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 Former Secret Police Chief Blames Pinochet for Abuses
 
 By Jonathan Franklin and Monte Reel
 
  SANTIAGO, Chile, May 14 -- The former chief of Chile's secret police has submitted a court document that claims to detail what happened to hundreds of people who disappeared during Gen. Augusto Pinochet's 17-year military dictatorship, casting blame on the former military ruler.
 
 Lawyers for retired Gen. Manuel Contreras submitted a 32-page document to Chile's Supreme Court on Friday that purportedly reveals what was done with the bodies of about 580 people -- almost half of those still considered missing. Human rights groups immediately questioned the information and its source, citing Contreras's years of deception and denials.
 
 Many of the details Contreras provided -- such as the assertion that many of the bodies were dumped into the Pacific Ocean -- were previously known; others contradicted the findings of commissions that have investigated the disappearances.
 
 In an 11-page letter accompanying a spreadsheet with information about victims, Contreras, 75, wrote that Pinochet personally ordered human rights violations and that the ex-dictator's claims that his subordinates were responsible for any abuses was "an intolerable injustice."
 
 Contreras alleged that Pinochet personally ordered the killing of Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean foreign and defense minister who was killed in a car bombing in Washington in 1976 with his American assistant, Ronni Moffitt. Contreras wrote that Pinochet also ordered the 1974 killing of a former general, Carlos Prats, in Argentina. Contreras was previously jailed for his role in Letelier's death and is currently serving a sentence for the 1975 disappearance of activist Miguel Angel Sandoval.
 
 Contreras served as the head of the intelligence agency, known as DINA, which carried out many of the human rights abuses of the Pinochet era. The Chilean government estimates that 3,190 people were killed for opposing Pinochet and that about 1,200 of those remain missing.
 
 Pinochet, who led the coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende in 1973, has been indicted twice, but the courts have ruled that the 89-year-old is too ill to stand trial.
 
 Many of the disappearances that Pinochet has attributed to DINA were listed by Contreras as "killed in combat," a designation that human rights groups and relatives of the victims said they considered offensive. The secret detention centers where the government kept many of those who disappeared were not mentioned.
 
 Other investigations have determined that some victims were killed after being forced to return to Chile from other countries; Contreras's list indicates that those victims died abroad.
 
 "Contreras's list is just another coverup," said Sebastian Brett, a researcher in Santiago for Human Rights Watch, a U.S.-based advocacy group. "This is intended to help his former subordinates who committed horrific abuses, not the families of the victims."
 
 For years, relatives have pressed for more details about the fates of those who disappeared. After reading Contreras's list, some groups representing victims' families said their long search for more information was not any closer to being over.
 
 "There are plenty of lies that a judge will have to determine and Contreras will have to answer, because he has lied one more time to the country," Mireya Garcia, vice president of an association of family members of the disappeared, said at a news conference in Santiago.
 
 Peter Kornbluh, director of the Chile project at the private National Security Archive in Washington, said that although the information could be viewed as a "small step forward" in the continuing investigations into Pinochet's government, Contreras's motives seemed questionable.
 
 "He's in jail and he's learned that abject denial doesn't keep him free," Kornbluh said.
 
 Reel reported from Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina.
 
 
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