A team of forensic specialists in Chile on 8 April 2013 began work of exhuming poet Pablo Neruda’s body to find out whether he was murdered or died of prostate cancer. Nobel prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda died just 12 days after military coup of 1973. The 1973 military coup had ousted Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende, thus bringing General Augusto Pinochet in power.
It was believed that Pablo Neruda died because of prostate cancer but in 2011, the possibility of poisoning of the poet by agents of Pinochet regime also came in limelight. He died on 23 September 1973 in Santiago.
The remains of Pablo Neruda were in a tomb at his home in Isla Negra. The poet had won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was renowned for his love poems. Apart from being the poet, he was also a Communist Party politician. The Chilean justice system ordered probe in June 2011 after filing of complaint by the Chilean Communist Party.