Initial tests confirm Pablo Neruda suffered from advanced cancer

The initial tests performed on the bone remains of Chilean Nobel literature laureate Pablo Neruda show that the poet was suffering from advanced prostate cancer, sources linked the process confirmed.

The report from the University of North Carolina medical school was delivered on Thursday to Judge Mario Carroza, who approved a request by Chile's Communist Party for the disinterment.

Bone remains of Chilean Nobel literature laureate Pablo Neruda were analyzed at the University of North Carolina medical school in the United States as investigators sought to resolve a four-decade mystery about his death.

Neruda's body was exhumed in an effort to discover if he died from prostate cancer as was recorded, or if he was poisoned by agents of Gen. Augusto Pinochet's bloody dictatorship, as his driver and others believe.

Neruda was also a leftist politician and would have been a strong voice in exile against Pinochet's regime. That ended with his death just 24 hours before he was to have escaped Chile in the chaos after the Sept. 11, 1973m military coup.

He was 69 and suffering from prostate cancer when he died 12 days after the coup that led his close friend, socialist President Salvador Allende, to kill himself rather than surrender to Pinochet's troops attacking the presidential palace.

For long, the official version was that Neruda died of natural causes brought on by the trauma of witnessing the coup and the killing of many of his friends. But suspicions remained, even after Pinochet lost power and Chile returned to a democracy in 1990.

For years, Neruda's driver and aide said dictatorship agents injected poison into Neruda's stomach while he was bedridden at the Santa Maria clinic in Santiago.