SANTIAGO, Chile — A former director of a Pinochet-era intelligence agency killed himself on Saturday, officials said, days after the government announced that it would close the exclusive military prison where he was being held for human rights crimes and transfer the inmates to a less privileged detention center.

The former intelligence chief, Gen. Odlanier Mena, 87, shot himself at home, officials said, where he had been allowed to spend weekends since mid-2011. At that time, he had completed half of a six-year sentence for the 1973 murder of three leftists while he was commander of an army regiment in Arica, in northern Chile. General Mena, who retired from the army, was director of the National Information Center intelligence agency from 1977 to 1980.

The Cordillera Detention Center in eastern Santiago, where General Mena had been serving his sentence, was set up on the grounds of the army’s telecommunications command center in 2004. At the time, the Supreme Court was abandoning its practice of applying a 1978 amnesty law in human rights cases, and the government feared that Punta Peuco, a special military prison created in 1995 to hold human rights offenders, would not suffice.

General Mena’s lawyer, Jorge Balmaceda, blamed the recent government decision for his client’s suicide. “In the last letter he sent me he expressed concern for the eventual transfer, which would cause him serious moral, physical and psychological harm,” Mr. Balmaceda said in an interview with TVN, the Chilean national television station.