Manuel Contreras, who headed Chile's intelligence service, Dina, in the 1970s and 80s, has died in a military hospital in the capital city of Santiago.
According to the BBC, Contreras, who died at the age of 86, had been in the military hospital since the end of last month.
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The victim's family said that Contreras had been sentenced to 500 years in jail for human rights abuses and was one of the main architects of Plan Condor, a co-ordinated campaign of political repression and assassination by military governments in the southern cone of South America which is said to have killed tens of thousands of people across the region.
A presidential decree had earlier in 2009 announced that he would not receive any military honour on his death.