Former US navy captain gave information to Chilean officials that led to executions of journalist and student, judge finds

A Chilean court has said US military intelligence services played a key role in the killings of two Americans in Chile in 1973 in a case that inspired the Oscar-winning film Missing.

A court ruling released late on Monday said a former US navy captain, Ray Davis, gave information to Chilean officials about journalist Charles Horman and student Frank Teruggi that led to their arrest and execution days after the coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power.

"The military intelligence services of the United States had a fundamental role in the creation of the murders of the two American citizens in 1973, providing Chilean military officers with the information that led to their deaths," the ruling said.

The judge Jorge Zepeda upheld a decision to charge Pedro Espinoza, a retired Chilean army colonel, with the murders, and Rafael Gonzalez, a former civilian counter-intelligence agent, as an accomplice in Horman's murder. The two Chileans and Davis were indicted in 2011. Davis commanded the US military mission in Chile at the time of the American-backed coup that ousted the democratically elected government of the leftist president Salvador Allende.

Davis was investigating Americans in Chile as part of a series of covert intelligence operations run from the US embassy targeting those considered to be subversives or radicals, according to the judge's investigation. Officials at the embassy in Santiago had no immediate comment.

Believing Davis to be living in Florida, Chile's supreme court approved an extradition request after he was indicted in November 2011. But Davis was secretly living in Chile, and he died in a Santiago nursing home last year.

Horman, 31, a freelance journalist and film-maker, was arrested on 17 September 1973. A national truth commission formed after the Pinochet dictatorship ended said Horman was executed the next day while in the custody of Chilean state security agents. The commission said Teruggi, a 24-year-old university student, was executed on 22 September.

The search for Horman by his wife and father was the topic of the 1982 movie Missing, starring Sissy Spacek and Jack Lemmon. The film won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay and was nominated for best picture, actor and actress.

The film suggested US complicity in Horman's death, and at the time drew strong objections from US state department officials. The case remained practically ignored in Chile until 2000 when Horman's widow, Joyce, filed a lawsuit against Pinochet.

She said after the judge's ruling was released: "More than 40 years after my husband was killed, and almost 14 years since I initiated judicial proceedings in Chile, I am delighted that the cases of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi are moving forward in the Chilean courts. At the same time, I remain outraged that, through death and delay, a key indicted US official, Captain Ray Davis, has escaped this prosecutorial process.

"Judge Zepeda's ruling both implicates and incriminates US intelligence personnel as playing a dark role in the murder of my husband. My hope is that the record of evidence compiled by the court sheds further light on how and why Charles was targeted, who actually ordered his murder, and what kind of information on one of its own citizens the US government passed to the Chilean military who committed this heinous crime."

Chile's government estimates that 3,095 people were killed during Pinochet's dictatorship, including about 1,200 who. AP Santiago