Augusto Pinochet expected London to be a hospitable city when he arrived there in October 1998. The 82-year-old former Chilean dictator had backed Margaret Thatcher in the Falklands war and, while the Conservatives were no longer in power, a former prime minister counted as a friend in high places.British police were not interested in kidnap, murder and torture in South America under a junta that had seized power in a coup in 1973. Besides, a former head of state had diplomatic immunity. Or so Pinochet thought, until officers from Scotland Yard, acting on an extradition request from a Spanish judge, turned up at the private clinic where he had undergone a minor back operation.
The ensuing legal battle to determine which crimes might be pinned on the old man, under what statute and in which jurisdiction, is one thread of 38 Londres Street by lawyer and author Philippe Sands. It is woven around a second story: Walther Rauff was an SS officer who had overseen the development of gas lorries in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe – vehicles customised to murder their mostly Jewish passengers with diverted exhaust fumes. Rauff evaded prosecution at Nuremberg and eventually settled in Patagonia. He was arrested in 1962 and almost extradited to West Germany, but spared by a Chilean supreme court ruling that a 15-year statute of limitations on his crimes had expired.
