CHILE’S government has acknowledged that Nobel-prize winning poet Pablo Neruda may have been murdered after the 1973 coup by General Augusto Pinochet.

The Interior Ministry released a statement on Thursday amid press reports that Mr Neruda might not have died of cancer.

The statement acknowledged a ministry document dated March of this year, which stated that it was “clearly possible and highly probable that a third party” was responsible for Mr Neruda’s death.

A close friend of President Salvador Allende, who died in the September 11 coup, the poet had planned to go into exile.

But a day before his departure he was taken by ambulance to the Santa Maria clinic in Santiago, where he had been treated for prostate cancer. He died there on September 23, officially of natural causes.

Tests for toxins on his exhumed body in 2013 were negative, but the judge investigating has ordered new tests for other substances.