BUENOS AIRES -- (AFP) -- Argentina formally requested Friday the extradition of
 Chilean former dictator Augusto Pinochet in connection with the 1974
 assassination of a Chilean general in Buenos Aires, a prosecutor said.

 ``Federal Judge Juan José Galeano filed the request, and also has asked Interpol
 for [Pinochet's] preventive arrest so that he can be extradited,'' prosecutor Jorge
 Alvarez Berlanda said.

 Argentina wants to try Pinochet, five other officers and a civilian for alleged
 involvement in the killing here of Gen. Carlos Prats of Chile. Prats and his family
 had gone into exile in Argentina after the 1973 coup in which Pinochet rose to
 power.

 Prats was Pinochet's predecessor as chief of the army in the administration of
 socialist president Salvador Allende.

 After Allende's death in September 1973, during the coup led by Pinochet, Prats
 and his wife Sofía Cuthbert fled into exile in the Argentine capital. They were killed
 there on Sept. 30, 1974, when a bomb planted under their car exploded.

 Last May, Argentine Judge María Servini de Cubría notified Pinochet that charges
 had been filed against him following a four-year investigation into Prats' death.

 That month, a former member of Pinochet's secret police who served prison time
 for his role in the car-bombing death of another former Allende associate admitted
 he planted the bomb that killed Prats.

 Secret-police agent Michael Townley was jailed in the United States in 1979 for
 planting the bomb that killed former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his
 secretary Ronnie Moffitt in the U.S. capital in September 1976. Townley was later
 released and lives under an assumed identity in the United States.

 Argentina is trying another former member of Chile's secret police, Enrique
 Arancibía Clavel, who has been held since 1996, accused of participating in Prats'
 murder.