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Witnesses have recently raised doubts about poet's death in 1973, including driver who claims he was poisoned by government agents
The Chilean Communist party has called for a formal investigation into the death of the country's revered poet Pablo Neruda, who died of cancer days after the 1973 coup in which his close friend President Salvador Allende was toppled.
Several witnesses have recently raised doubts about Neruda's death, including his driver, who has claimed the poet was poisoned by government agents.
Neruda died at the age of 69 on 23 September 1973, 12 days after the coup. He had just published a withering criticism of General Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship that eulogised Allende and accused Chilean soldiers of having betrayed their country.
He had won the Nobel prize for literature two years earlier, giving him great international prestige.
The cause of Neruda's death was given as prostate cancer. He died in the same clinic where the former president Eduardo Frei was allegedly poisoned in 1981 by six people, including several Pinochet agents, who were charged last year in connection with his death.
Neruda's driver, Manuel Araya, has alleged that Pinochet agents injected deadly poison into Neruda's stomach.
The Neruda Foundation, which administers the poet's estate and legacy, has said there is no evidence to support the driver's claims.
But Guillermo Teillier, the president of the Communist party, to which Neruda belonged, told the appellate court in Santiago that it was a moral requirement to clarify whether Neruda was killed in order to silence his criticism.
Teillier cited similar doubts about the deaths of Allende, Frei and the prominent socialist minister Jose Toha, who was found hanged while in military custody. Allende's remains are being analysed by an international panel of forensic experts.
In an interview, the party's lawyer, Eduardo Contreras, said Araya was not the only person to have raised doubts about Neruda's death.
He said other Neruda employees also asked questions, and Mexico's former ambassador to Chile, Gonzalo Martinez Corbala, found Neruda to be in good shape a day before his death.
Neruda's death will be investigated by Judge Mario Carroza, who is also handling the case of Allende and 725 other deaths during the dictatorship.
Allende's remains were removed from his tomb last week for a new autopsy after discrepancies were found between police and military reports on his death.
