A court in Santiago has convicted three former agents of Augusto Pinochet's secret police for the murder of Ronni Karpen Moffitt in a 1976 car bomb attack in Washington DC. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.

Judge Paola Plaza sentenced Pedro Espinoza, José Zara, and Raúl Iturriaga to 15 years in prison for their roles in the killing of 25-year-old Moffitt. All three were agents of the Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (DINA), Pinochet's feared secret police that hunted down opponents at home and abroad.

Espinoza and Iturriaga, who is serving more than 500 years for human rights atrocities, are being held at a special facility outside Santiago. Zara had been released in August last year after completing a 15-year sentence but has now been rearrested.

On 21 September 1976, Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean minister and ambassador to the US, and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt were driving to work when the bomb exploded on Massachusetts Avenue. According to the court ruling, the agents, led by notorious DINA chief Manuel Contreras, concocted a plan to carry out extrajudicial murders on foreign soil and surveilled Letelier, whose murder was initially investigated separately.

Rebecca Karpen, Moffitt's niece, said: "These sentences are not just a victory for our family, but are a reminder that the countless lives ruined by the Pinochet regime are still being fought for, that the pain of the Chilean people will not be forgotten."

Juan Pablo Letelier, the former ambassador's son, called on the US to pursue justice against the killers.

Orlando Letelier had become a prominent critic of the dictatorship while living in exile in the US. On 10 September 1976, Pinochet revoked his Chilean citizenship. That night, Letelier addressed a crowd of 75,000 at an anti-Pinochet rally at Madison Square Garden in New York, saying: "I was born a Chilean, I am a Chilean, and I will die a Chilean. They were born traitors, they live as traitors, and they will be known forever as fascist traitors."

The brazen killings in Washington frayed relations between Chile and the US, which had supported Pinochet's 1973 coup. The US Congress ordered an investigation and imposed an arms embargo on Chile. Pinochet's junta disbanded DINA, quietly replacing it with the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI) a few months later.