On an arrest warrant – Grace Livingstone in TLS:

‘A few hours earlier, in Madrid, a Spanish judge had received a fax from Scotland Yard informing him that Pinochet was leaving London the next day. It was now or never. Baltasar Garzón sat alone in his office and wrote an arrest warrant. “By hand, on a sheet of paper with a pen. I did everything from memory. I assumed the effort could fail, but I had to try.” Pinochet had overthrown the elected government of Chile in 1973 and presided over a military regime that lasted until 1990. He was directly involved, wrote Garzón, in the physical elimination, disappearance, kidnapping and torture of thousands of individuals, including several Spanish citizens.’

(…)

‘Pinochet was kept under house arrest in Britain for eighteen months and, in a historic judgement, the House of Lords ruled that a former head of state was not immune from prosecution in another country for international crimes.
In his reconstruction of Pinochet’s arrest and extradition hearings, Philippe Sands has interviewed all the key players, but this is not just a gripping behind-the-scenes court drama. In alternate chapters, the book also tells the story of a former Nazi war criminal and the role he played in the Pinochet dictatorship. Walter Rauff was a German SS leader who fled to Chile after the Second World War. He was responsible for the invention of the mobile gas van, used to kill 97,000 people in Poland, Latvia and Crimea. He designed a prototype of the van that was first used on detainees in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, north of Berlin: prisoners were locked in the back and an exhaust pipe emitting carbon monoxide was fed into the vehicle. Rauff went on to oversee the manufacture and operation of the vans across Nazi-occupied Europe.’

(…)

‘Just like Rauff, Pinochet never showed any remorse. Sands says he spent his time in Britain watching Star Wars films and reading books about Napoleon: “stoical”, Schweitzer says; “grumpy”, according to Pateras.’

(…)

‘A breezy Powell claims barely to remember meeting the Chilean emissary who came to London to negotiate Pinochet’s return, but the case still rankles with Straw. “An extremely unpleasant fascist … I kept this bloke locked up for sixteen months. I could have decided he was fit to travel and left it to the Spanish courts. I wish I had, but there you go.”’

Read the review here.

But there you go. The fascination for perpetrators is endless, sometimes this fascination is presented as a quest for justice – and to be honest it can be this quest – but the addiction to what’s called evil should not be underestimated.

In any case: I wish I had, but there you go.