LIMA: Juan Carlos Hurtado, a cabinet chief under ex-president Alberto Fujimori who is in prison for corruption and rights abuses surrendered to authorities after a decade in hiding, police said Wednesday.

Police have been looking for Hurtado since 2001 on charges of embezzlement, collusion and conspiracy to commit a crime for accepting $250,000 from an illegal source to finance his 1998 campaign for mayor of Lima.

His decision to surrender comes as Fujimori's daughter Keiko enters a presidential run-off campaign against nationalist Ollanta Humala.

Keiko Fujimori, 35, has campaigned heavily on her father's record of crushing the country's leftist insurgencies in the 1990s.

Hurtado, who was also Alberto Fujimori's finance minister, decided to surrender because the statute of limitations on some of the charges has expired, according to Peruvian media.

Hurtado surrendered to an anti corruption court in Lima accompanied by his lawyer and supporters.

Alberto Fujimori was sentenced in 2009 to 25 years in prison for corruption and human rights abuses during his decade in power from 1990 to 2000.

Humala, a nationalist populist in the mold of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, emerged as the frontrunner after Sunday's first round in the presidential elections.

Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2011

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