The former Chilean dictator, Gen Augusto Pinochet, was under house arrest yesterday, court sources said, after a judge charged him with masterminding the killing in 1973 of 75 political opponents.
Prosecutor Mr Jose Galeano announced the charges handed down by Judge Juan Guzman against the ailing 85-year-old general.
Judge Guzman is co-ordinating 186 criminal complaints filed in Santiago against the former dictator who rose to power in a 1973 coup and left office in 1990. Seven of the lawsuits are related to the "caravan of death" case.
On Gen Pinochet's order, an army mission combed five cities nationwide under Gen Sergio Arellano, staging summary trials of followers of the ousted socialist president, Salvador Allende.
Gen Pinochet was arrested in October 1998 during a private visit to Britain under a warrant issued by a Spanish judge seeking to try him for human rights abuses during his rule in Chile.
He was held in Britain until March this year while a series of courts debated whether he should be extradited to Spain. The British government eventually let him return home after deciding he was too frail to stand trial.
The former dictator, recently released from hospital after treatment for pneumonia, must answer to the charges filed by relatives of the some 3,000 opponents to his military regime who were killed, or abducted and presumed killed, while he was in power.
Born in Valparaiso, Gen Pinochet entered the military at 18, joining the army school and rising slowly through the ranks.
He wrote several books on military geography and geopolitics, and in 1971 was named commander of the army garrison in Santiago.
It was Salvador Allende who appointed Gen Pinochet head of the army, just three weeks before the coup that was to cost him his life.
Declaring himself head of the junta, Pinochet said: "I am a man with no ambitions." A year later he signed a decree naming himself president.
During his regime, in particular during the bloody, early months in which dissent was ruthlessly crushed, the outcry over human rights violations at home and the killing of Allende collaborators abroad turned Chile into an international pariah.
Gen Pinochet was enthusiastically supported by Chile's conservatives - and by the US administration under Richard Nixon - who happily accepted his argument that he had intervened to prevent a Cuban-style Marxist takeover.
With no unions to contend with - strikes were suppressed - and no Congress, Gen Pinochet imposed a programme of draconian economic policies designed to slash inflation and sell off state-owned companies.
The policy left millions of Chileans hungry and jobless as national industries found themselves unable to compete with cheap imports.
A brief but impressive economic boom was followed by a crash in 1982 and, for the first time since the coup, students, businessmen and union leaders took to the streets in violent protests. Armed groups began to organise to try to oust the dictator.
After nearly 17 years of unbridled power, Gen Pinochet reluctantly stepped down following a stunning defeat in a 1988 plebiscite on whether he should remain in office for another eight years.
Before handing over, Gen Pinochet ensured that he would not fade away as most of his fellow Latin American dictators have done.
Under the 1980 constitution drafted by his allies, Pinochet was allowed to remain as army chief until March 1998 and granted a Senate seat for life, complete with immunity from prosecution.
He was stripped of his parliamentary immunity on August 8th by Chile's Supreme Court.