‘This was not an accident. This was a bomb.’
Secret police, hired killers and a former Chilean diplomat’s brazen murder in the streets of D.C.:
The assassination of #Orlando_Letelier, as told by those who knew him and found his killers
▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2016/09/20/this-was-not-an-accident-this-was-a-bomb
On a muggy autumn morning four decades ago, a car exploded in Washington. It had motored along Massachusetts Avenue NW, rounding the bend at Sheridan Circle, when a remote-controlled bomb taped beneath the vehicle was triggered.
A driver in a car nearby would later describe the fiery impact of the blast: “I saw an automobile actually coming down out of the air.”
The smoldering wreck lurched to a halt in front of the Romanian Embassy, its windows blown open and entire floor panel gone. A police officer who arrived on the scene remembered welling up with nausea. There was blood and debris everywhere and a human foot in the roadway. A fatally wounded man lay on the pavement; his legs were missing from above the knees.
This was Orlando Letelier, a 44-year-old former Chilean diplomat who had been driving to work at a D.C. think tank along with his colleague, Ronni Moffitt, 25, and her husband, Michael.
LEFT: Ronni Moffitt, who was a development associate at the Institute for Policy at the time of her death in the 1976 car bombing. (Family photo) MIDDLE: Isabel Letelier, right, and Michael Moffitt embrace after placing roses at the site where Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt were killed in 1976. (UPI) RIGHT: Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean ambassador to the U.S., is pictured in April 1975. (Associated Press/AS)
