Augusto Pinochet's arrest and trial dating history

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General Augusto Pinochet was indicted for human rights violations in his native Chile on 10 October 1998 by Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón. He was arrested in London six days later and finally released by the British government in March 2000. Authorized to freely return to Chile, he was there first indicted by judge Juan Guzmán Tapia, and charged of a number of crimes, before dying on 10 December 2006, without having been convicted in any case. His arrest in London made the front-page of newspapers worldwide as not only did it involve the head of the military dictatorship that ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990, but it was the first time that several European judges applied the principle of universal jurisdiction, declaring themselves competent to judge crimes committed by former heads of state, despite local amnesty laws.