Alberto Fujimori, the fugitive former president of Peru, was heading home last night to face trial for murder and corruption after losing his legal battle to remain in Chile.

In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court of Chile unanimously approved Mr Fujimori’s extradition on five corruption charges and alleged human rights violations carried out while he ruled Peru between 1990 and 2000.

Human Rights Watch said that this was the first time a court had ordered the extradition of a former leader to be tried in his country for human rights violations.

“After years of evading justice, Fujimori will finally have to respond to the charges and evidence against him in the country he used to run like a Mafia boss,” said José Miguel Vivanco, the group’s director for the Americas.

The charges filed by Peruvian prosecutors include the slaughter of nine students and a professor at La Cantuta University in 1992, and the murder of 15 people in the working-class Barrios Altos neighbourhood of Lima in 1991, during the Government’s “dirty war” against Maoist rebels of Shining Path.

“[The vote] was much easier than we thought and the important thing above all was Barrios Altos and

La Cantuta,” said Justice Alberto Chaigneau, the president of the court.

Gisela Ortiz, whose sister died in the La Cantuta massacre, said: “This fight has not been in vain.”

The corruption charges involve alleged payoffs to politicians and the media, illegal phone-tapping and misuse of £7.5 million of government funds. Peruvian prosecutors are seeking 30 years in prison for each human rights charge. The corruption charges carry ten-year sentences.

Mr Fujimori, the son of Japanese immigrants, became president of Peru in 1990 after beating Mario Vargas Llosa, the novelist, at the polls. An agronomist and former mathematics professor, he inherited a country crippled by hyperinflation and political violence.

He stepped up the fight against Shining Path, closing down the opposition-dominated Congress and suspending the Constitution. He scored a great success with the capture in 1992 of Abimael Guzmán, the elusive founder of Shining Path.

In 1997, Mr Fujimori made headlines around the world when he sent in commandos to end a four-month hostage-taking at the Japanese Ambassador’s residence in Lima.

Mr Fujimori, mired in a corruption scandal and allegations of human rights abuses, deserted the presidency a few months into his third term. He resigned by fax from a hotel room in Japan, which, recognising his Japanese dual citizenship, refused to extradite him. But he flew unannounced to Chile in 2005 in a bid to launch a political comeback in Peru.

He was detained on his arrival and placed under house arrest at a rented mansion outside Santiago, the capital. In an apparent bid to avoid extradition, he ran for the Japanese parliament in July but failed to win a seat.

Mr Fujimori, who has repeatedly denied the charges against him, said last night that he was not surprised by the Chilean court’s verdict and regarded it as an opportunity to return to Peru.

“My goal during these last few years is to meet the people again,” he told Peru’s RPP radio. While acknowledging his Government committed “terrible mistakes”, he said: “In the trials themselves, I will show that I acted in a correct manner.”

Chilean police said after the verdict that they expected to put Mr Fujimori on a plane “within hours”. Mr Fujimori’s former spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, was arrested in Venezuela in 2001 and jailed in the same high-security naval prison that houses Guzmán and other Shining Path leaders.

Peru’s Prime Minister, Jorge del Castillo, urged that Mr Fujimori should be treated with “equity and justice”.

Times Recommends

• Tehran cannot live up to its rhetoric
• The new unicycle that will ‘change the world’
• We cannot wish away Iran’s bomb