A judge in Chile has ordered the exhumation of the remains of the poet Pablo Neruda, as part of an inquest into his death in 1973, BBC News said.

The left-wing Nobel Prize winner died 12 days after a military coup replaced the socialist president Salvador Allende with General Augusto Pinochet.

The poet's family has always maintained that he died in a Santiago clinic of advanced prostate cancer, aged 69.

Chile started investigating allegations that he may have been poisoned in 2011. The current investigation was brought about after Neruda's former driver, Manuel Araya Osorio, said that agents injected the poet with poison at the clinic on the orders of General Pinochet.

The date of the exhumation has not been fixed yet.

His body is buried next to his wife Matilde Urrutia in Isla Negra, 120km (70 miles) west of the capital Santiago.