CUBA: Terrorism Suspect May Be Released on Bail in Panama

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Mar 14 2002 (IPS) - Three Latin American countries have requested the extradition of Luis Posada Carriles, a notorious militant of the anti-Castro Cuban exile community currently in jail in Panama. Nevertheless, his lawyer is confident that he will be released on bail in May.

El Salvador recently announced that it wanted to bring him to trial, while Cuba unsuccessfully requested his extradition in connection with several crimes, including an alleged plot to assassinate President Fidel Castro.

Venezuela, meanwhile, wants him to complete the sentence he was serving when he escaped from prison in that country in 1985, where he was convicted in connection with a 1976 explosion of a Cuban airliner, which killed all 73 people aboard.

But Posada Carriles’ lawyer in Panama, Rogelio Cruz, is confident that he will be able to get his client released on bail in May, now that Panama’s office of the public prosecutor announced its decision to reduce the charges against him, and not to try him for attempted murder.

Posada Carriles, along with his fellow Cuban exiles Pedro Remón Rodríguez, Manuel Díaz and Guillermo Novo, has been in prison in Panama since November 2000. The four are accused by Castro of plotting to kill him while he was attending the 10th Ibero- American Summit in Panama City.

According to the Cuban government, the accused planned to detonate powerful plastic explosives in an auditorium of Panama’s public university during an event that Castro was to attend.

“The explosives (found in the suspects’ possession) were capable of destroying several blocks…the disaster would have caused thousands and thousands of deaths,” Rafael Rodríguez, a professor at the Autonomous University of Panama, told Cuba’s public television Tuesday.

The Panamanian courts, however, dismissed the lawsuits brought by student organisations, trade unions and indigenous groups, which underlined the large number of people who would have been killed or injured if the plan had been carried out.

Panama’s office of the public prosecutor removed the charge of attempted murder from the report it sent to the Supreme Court.

But authorities in Cuba complained that attempted murder was the charge “that represented, precisely, the main offense committed by the four terrorists.”

However, the Cuban Foreign Ministry was even more upset by remarks by Cruz, a former attorney-general of Panama, who claimed the decision by the office of the public prosecutor amounted to admission of his client’s “innocence.”

“They have come up with the excuse that the detonator was not found,” and thus argue that “the only thing the suspects can be accused of is possession of weapons, forgery and illicit association,” said Rodríquez.

Failing to charge Posada Carriles with attempted murder constitutes “a legal aberration,” the university professor argued.

Last April, Panama rejected the extradition request presented by Cuba four months earlier, despite Havana’s promise that none of the suspects would face the death penalty, since capital punishment does not exist in Panama’s penal code.

The Panamanian government of Mireya Moscoso has not responded to Venezuela’s extradition request.

El Salvador announced last Saturday that it would also seek extradition of Posada Carriles, who is accused of obtaining forged identity documents in that Central American country.

Two days earlier, Salvadoran President Francisco Flores had stated that authorities in Panama were “convinced” that the allegations that Posada Carriles was planning to kill Castro were false, and that the accused would hence be “prosecuted for lesser crimes.”

Cuba’s Foreign Ministry complained of “an obvious manoeuvre to try to rescue a figure who had his central headquarters in San Salvador for years, where he hatched his most sinister plots, and where he enjoys the complicity of the highest-level Salvadoran officials.

“It would be a disgrace for Panamanian authorities, who unjustifiably rejected Cuba’s petition, to accede now to a Salvadoran request, the aim of which is all too clear,” the communique added.

According to the Cuban government, El Salvador aims to protect Posada Carriles by bringing him to trial on lesser charges.

Havana blames Posada Carriles for a 1997 series of explosions of hotels and other tourist infrastructure in Cuba, in which an Italian businessman was killed. It also holds him responsible for organising a number of assassination attempts against Castro. (Cuban authorities say the president has survived 600 such attempts over the past four decades).

In a 1998 interview with The New York Times, Posada Carriles himself admitted to staging actions against Cuba.

Panama said its rejection of Cuba’s extradition request was based on international legal agreements and on the fact that Posada Carriles was already a defendant in a trial.

But article 15 of the Inter-American convention on extradition states that “When extradition is requested by more than one state for the same offense, the requested state shall give preference to the request of the state in which the offense was committed.

“If the requests are for different offenses, preference shall be given to the state seeking the individual for the offense punishable by the most severe penalty, in accordance with the laws of the requested state.

“If the requests involve different offenses that the requested state considers to be of equal gravity, preference shall be determined by the order in which the requests are received,” adds the convention, to which El Salvador, Venezuela and Panama are signatories.

Posada Carriles, a naturalised Venezuelan citizen, was sentenced in Caracas to 27 years in prison as “directly responsible” for the explosion, in full flight, of the Cubana de Aviación plane off the coast of Barbados in 1976.

The Cuban government maintains that Posada Carriles escaped from prison in Venezuela with “the help and financing of the Cuban-American National Foundation,” one of the most influential and radical anti-Castro Cuban exile groups based in Miami.