The United States knew about a decades-old South American operation to hunt down leftist opponents but had no part in the plot, Italian prosecutors say.
Rome prosecutor Giancarlo Capaldo, who has issued arrest warrants for 140 former government chiefs and military and intelligence officers in seven South American countries, saw references to so-called Operation Condor in declassified Justice Department documents he obtained in his probe, judicial sources said on Thursday.
Capaldo is set to ask the Italian justice ministry to forward extradition requests to the countries whose military regimes sent teams to kill fugitive dissidents including 25 Italian citizens, the sources said.
On Wednesday night the Brazilian justice ministry said it was not likely to grant such requests.
The other countries concerned - Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay and Peru - have yet to respond to the news of the arrest warrants.
A 60-year-old Uruguayan ex-navy intelligence officer, Nestor Jorge Fernandez Troccoli, was arrested earlier this week in the southern Italian city of Salerno, where he has been living for several years.
Now also an Italian citizen, Troccoli is being questioned in Rome's Regina Coeli prison on suspicion of involvement in the death of four Italians.
Capaldo started his probe in December 1998 on the basis of suits filed by the relatives of the 25 Italians allegedly killed in Operation Condor, which ran from 1975 to the mid 1980s.
At least one of the 25 was not a leftist militant, judicial sources said Thursday.
Former Argentine military leader Jorge Rafael Videla; ex-Uruguay junta chief Jorge Maria Bordaberry and his successor Gregorio Alvarez; former Peruvian president Francisco Morales; former Peruvian premier Pedro Richter Prada; three former Argentine ministers; and a former Paraguayan minister are among those named by Capaldo on suspicion of multiple abduction and murder.
Six more were originally named, including former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Another suspect is the former head of Chile's secret service, Manuel Contreras, who was tried and convicted in absentia in Rome in 1999 of the attempted murder in Rome in 1975 of Chilean Christian Democrat leader Bernardo Leighton.
Operation Condor is believed to have claimed thousands of lives and its shadow has not yet been shaken off, South America observers say.
There have also been investigations into Operation Condor in France and Spain and some are proceeding.
In 1990 a French court sentenced a former Argentine navy officer to life imprisonment in absentia for his involvement in the disappearance of two French nuns.
An Argentina junta-era officer was extradited to Spain in 2003.
