Sebastián Piñera: lawyer asks to suspend the crimes for which he was being investigated

Lawyer Luis Mariano Rendon formally requested the dismissal of the pending cases of the late former Chilean president Sebastian Piñera (2010-2014 and 2018-2022), who is being investigated for his responsibility in the bloody repression of the popular protest of 2019, known as 'social outbreak', and for an alleged crime of corruption in the promotion of a mining project.

(Also: 'A noise similar to thunder': moments of Sebastián Piñera's accident revealed)

According to local media reports this Thursday, Both requests were presented this Wednesday by the lawyer in the Seventh Guarantee Court of Santiago de Chile alleging the cause of death.

Piñera died on Tuesday when the helicopter he was piloting crashed in Lake Ranco, in the south of the country, after having eaten at a mansion near his own, in an accident still under investigation.

(Read also: Sebastián Piñera: video of the moment when the coffin was received by Boric in Santiago)

In the case of the 'social outbreak', the omission of responsibility of civil and police commanders for human rights violations is investigated, in a process in which they are also prosecuted. the current general director of the militarized Carabineros police force, Ricardo Yáñez, who was then director of Order and Security, and his predecessor in the current position, retired general Mario Rozas.

The alleged crime of corruption is linked to the sale of the controversial Dominga mining project and some of the information found in the case 'Pandora Papers'which points out that The Piñera and Délano families would have sealed the business in the British Virgin Islands, a tax haven.

(Also: 'You guys jump': Sebastián Piñera's last order before dying; there are already hypotheses)

“Unfortunately, the Prosecutor's Office was extremely slow in both cases and no judicial conclusion was reached before the death of Sebastián Piñera,” lamented the lawyer. “The legal debate will remain unfinished forever in this regard,” concluded Rendón, quoted by local radio Biobío.

During the morning of Wednesday, the regional prosecutor of Los Ríos, Tatiana Esquivel, confirmed that the cause of death of the former president was “asphyxiation due to submersion.”

“This forensic data allows us to develop a more probable hypothesis of what the dynamics of this plane crash would have been like,” he explained.

(You can read: Chilean Prosecutor's Office confirms cause of death of former president Sebastián Piñera: this is what he said)

At the moment no further details will be offered, so it does not seem that the two main hypotheses that are being considered can be clarified: a technical problem due to the bad weather conditions in the area, with strong wind and rain, or some physical problem of the president, that would have caused him to lose control and not be able to remove the seat belt.

A tireless politician and successful businessman, with one of the largest fortunes in the region, in 2010 Piñera became the first conservative president to reach La Moneda after the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) and embodied a more renewed right. that he was able to exercise some self-criticism on the regime.

(Also read: Sebastián Piñera's maneuver to save his family in the accident in which he died)

Piñera, who governed Chile in two non-consecutive terms (2010-2014 and 2018-2022), is the second former president to die after the return to democracy in 1990. The first was in 2016, the Christian Democrat Patricio Aylwin, leader of the Chilean transition.

(Also: Sebastián Piñera's last publications on social networks before he died)

The State funeral will be held on Friday morning at the Metropolitan Cathedral of Santiago and, as explained by the Chilean Foreign Minister, Alberto van Klaveren, in charge of coordinating the ceremony, once the mass is over, the remains will go to La Moneda, and from there they will be transferred to the Memorial Park Cemetery, where a last tribute will be paid.

EFE