Cuba says U.S. broke anti-terrorism treaties
Source: Reuters
(Adds Posada telephone calls published in Cuba) By Anthony Boadle HAVANA, May 11 (Reuters) - Cuba accused the United Stateson Friday of violating international anti-terrorism treaties byfailing to prosecute an anti-Castro militant and former CIAoperative wanted for bomb attacks against the country. Cuba said Washington should have arrested Cuban exile LuisPosada Carriles under its own Patriot Act as a security threatand called for his extradition to Venezuela to stand trial forplotting the 1976 downing of a Cuban plane that killed 73people. "The U.S. government should have tried Posada Carriles forterrorism," Cuba said in a statement that deplored the freeingof the accused bomber after a U.S. judge dismissed immigrationfraud charges against him on Tuesday. "Let's see what the White House does now. It still has theoption to fulfill its international obligations to detain LuisPosada Carriles and extradite him to Venezuela," said thestatement published in the Communist Party newspaper Granma. Cuba said the immigration indictment was a "smoke screen"to avoid prosecuting Posada Carriles for acts of violence thatwould have revealed his links over 25 years to the CentralIntelligence Agency. Trained by the CIA for its failed Bay of Pigs invasion tooust Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 1961, Posada Carriles wasjailed in Venezuela for the 1976 bombing of the Cuban airliner,but escaped from prison in 1985. Venezuela, Cuba's leftist ally, requested his extraditionfrom the United States in 2005, but got no response. Posada Carriles, 79, was arrested in Miami in 2005 afterillegally entering the United States. Cuba also accuses him ofplotting a wave of bomb blasts in Cuban hotels and nightclubsto sabotage Cuba's tourism industry in 1997. A Italian touristwas killed. By not prosecuting Posada Carriles for his violent past,the United States had failed to comply with U.N. Resolution1373, a wide-ranging counter-terrorism adopted after the Sept.11 attacks, among other international conventions, Cuba said. INDICTMENT TO COME? The Cuban exile could yet be indicted on terrorism chargesin the United States by a federal grand jury in Newark, NewJersey, to determine his role in the 1997 Havana bombings, theMiami Herald reported last week. The FBI took the unusual step of sending agents to Cuba togather evidence last year, the newspaper said. In a 1998 interview, Posada Carriles told The New YorkTimes he plotted the wave of bomb blasts from Central Americafunded by Cuban exiles in Miami. He later denied saying so. On Friday, Cuba published transcripts of telephone calls itsaid Posada Carriles made from El Salvador in 1997 to anassociate in Venezuela about the Havana blasts. "We have two more explosions: we placed one in the SolPalmeras Hotel in Varadero and the other in a discotheque inHavana," Posada Carriles said, according to the transcriptspublished by Granma. It did not say how they were obtained butsaid they were passed to the FBI as evidence. Cuba has displayed evidence of the string of bombingsallegedly masterminded by the man it calls Latin America'sOsama bin Laden. Photographs show plastic explosives smuggled into Cuba inshampoo bottles, digital clocks used to make time bombs anddamages caused by the blasts. Targets included Havana's famedTropicana cabaret and the Bodeguita del Medio, where writerErnest Hemingway once drank his mojitos.
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