Venezuela vows to press for extradition of anti-Castro terrorist
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| Published on Friday, May 11, 2007 |
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By Theresa Bradley and Guillermo Parra-Bernal
CARACAS, Venezuela (Bloomberg): Venezuela has no intention of abandoning efforts to extradite convicted anti-Castro terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, who on Tuesday won dismissal of immigration fraud charges in a US court.
President Hugo Chavez vowed to push ahead with Venezuela's demand for Carriles, which the US has failed to act on since June 2005, Venezuela's US lawyer said. Carriles, 79, escaped from a Venezuelan prison in 1985, after being indicted on 73 counts of murder linked to the 1976 bombing of a Cuban passenger plane. He was arrested for illegally entering the US in 2005.
"He's a murderer and a terrorist and now enjoys full freedom in the United States," Chavez told reporters tonight in La Guaira, Venezuela. "The US government is protecting international terrorism."
The US failure to extradite Carriles, along with an April court decision to release him from prison on bond, has allowed Venezuelan and Cuban leaders to accuse the US of hypocrisy for protecting a terrorist while engaging in its own "War on Terror." Carriles was convicted in a Panama plot to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro in 2000.
Their rhetoric escalated on Tuesday, after a federal judge in Texas dropped the 2005 immigration charges against Carriles completely, ruling that prosecutors had manipulated and failed to properly translate his statements, freeing him from house arrest in Miami. His trial had been scheduled to start May 11.
Cuban Foreign Minister Perez Roque said on Wednesday, without citing any evidence, that US President George W. Bush had personally ordered Carriles's release, and accused the US of paying and protecting the suspected former CIA operative.
Carriles, a Venezuelan citizen, is also wanted in Cuba.
The US government's legal strategy on Carriles has been to seek "political cover by charging him with something while ensuring he'd never be deported, extradited or jailed," Venezuela's lawyer on the case in Washington, Jose Pertierra, said in a telephone interview.
US officials so far have declined to cooperate in extradition efforts, Venezuelan ambassador to the US Bernardo Alvarez told reporters in San Francisco. "What they do with their pardons is their problem, but history will tell," he said.
Justice Department officials are now reviewing Tuesday's court ruling and "deciding what their options are," US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters in Washington. The Department of Homeland Security, which has final say on deportation matters, could still order Carriles removed from US territory, McCormack said.
Even so, a federal judge already ruled he can't be deported to Venezuela because, according to evidence presented at a deportation hearing, Carriles could face torture there, Pertierra said. Extradition proceedings would trump that court decision, he added.
US Congressman Bill Delahunt separately called on the White House to certify Carriles as a "terrorist" under the USA Patriot Act for his prior conviction and record, which would allow the government to hold him indefinitely as an alien.
"The world will conclude that this administration has a double standard when it comes to fighting terrorism unless President Bush takes swift action to detain Posada," Delahunt said in a statement posted on his Congressional website.
"The consequences for our efforts to rally other nations to fight al Qaeda, especially in the Muslim world where some view Osama bin Laden as a similar hero, could be catastrophic." Delahunt, a Massachusetts Democrat, filed a similar request to Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez on May 3, noting that the FBI had described Carriles as a national security threat. | | | | Reads : 224 | | | |
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