Sweden's Chief Prosecutor said yesterday any decision to extradite Chile's former dictator, Gen Pinochet, to Sweden to face murder charges would depend on the House of Lords in London clearing a Spanish extradition request.
The Lords, Britain's highest court, will decide later this week whether Gen Pinochet, who was arrested in London on October 16th, can be extradited to face trial in Spain.
Meanwhile Ms Isabel Allende, daughter of Chile's former socialist president, Salvador Allende, arrived in Britain as exiles and human rights activists stepped up a campaign to bring Gen Pinochet (82) to justice.
Ms Allende, a Socialist Party politician in Chile and a cousin of the novelist Isabel Allende, led a group of four Chilean parliamentarians and the country's leading champion of the "disappeared" who flew to London in advance of the House of Lords ruling.
Sweden's Chief Prosecutor, Mr Jan Danielsson, said: "If the House of Lords comes to the same conclusion as London's High Court, then Pinochet will go home and if he does, there is nothing we can do about those allegations made in Sweden."
More than half of the estimated 52,000 Chileans who fled abroad to escape Gen Pinochet's iron rule took refuge in Sweden.
Ms Allende was accompanied by Mr Juan Pablo Letelier, son of former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier who was murdered in Washington in 1976, and Ms Sola Sierra, head of the Chilean group representing those arrested and disappeared.
"All the arguments to defend Pinochet have no validity when applied to a person who didn't have any humanity when he carried out the worst crimes in the history of our country", Ms Sierra said.
The Chilean delegation joined campaigners from the United States and Europe who flew into London over the weekend to add weight to the anti-Pinochet lobby.
"Those coming in feel it is important that they should be in Britain when this is happening. They want to be here to add their voices to the demands that justice be done," said Ms Diane Dixon, one of the British co-ordinators of the campaign.
Some of the campaigners yesterday held a silent vigil outside the Houses of Parliament. They included Joyce Horman, widow of the American journalist Charles Horman who "disappeared" during the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende. Horman was the subject of the 1982 film Missing.
A former Chilean MP, Ms Maria Maluenda, who was Chile's ambassador to North Korea in the Allende government and whose son was murdered in 1985, was also among the demonstrators.
In Rome, the Chilean Deputy Foreign Minister, Mr Mariano Fernandez, has held talks with a top Vatican official over the Pinochet arrest but made no request for mediation, Italian media reported. Mr Fernandez met Pope John Paul's Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, on Sunday for an hour. Cardinal Sodano was papal nuncio to Chile between 1977 and 1988.
In Germany, three separate suits were filed yesterday against Gen Pinochet for kidnapping and attacks, lawyers said. A lawyer, Mr Konstantin Thun, said that two were filed on behalf of a German, Mr Werner Simon (70), and another unidentified German who say they were taken away and tortured by Chilean security forces in 1973.
In a third suit, a Chilean woman who has since become a German citizen and lives in Cologne, filed a suit in Cologne for having been kidnapped and tortured in 1973 in Chile, her lawyer, Mr Alfred Bongard, said.
In Paris, a French investigating magistrate has issued an international arrest warrant against Gen Pinochet, judicial sources said.