Damaging testimony from a former secret police agent and new reports that Augusto Pinochet's health is not as bad as his lawyers claimed mean the Chilean ex-dictator could be about to face trial on human rights charges, rights lawyers and experts say.
Pinochet has been under house arrest since last week, charged with responsibility in the disappearances of six leftists presumed dead since 1974, and with tax fraud related to an estimated $27 million he hid in foreign accounts.
Chilean courts have convicted dozens of military officers and former secret police officials for rights abuses during the 1973-1990 military regime.
But cases against Pinochet, 90, have always been thrown out when his defense team argued that his mild dementia made him too ill to face a criminal process.
"I am under the impression that today more progress can be made (against him) than before, mostly because it is more certain that Pinochet was never crazy, but fooled the courts," said Hugo Gutierrez, a human rights lawyer working on cases against Pinochet.
Doctors on a court-appointed medical panel that examined Pinochet in the new cases against him found he was exaggerating his symptoms and that he was fit to undergo trial.
Pinochet ruled the country from 1973 to 1990, a period when over 3,000 people died in political violence and tens of thousands more were tortured or exiled.
While Pinochet is appealing the two recent indictments against him, another case is building against him.