Luis Posada Carriles Could Be Extradited to Panama for Allegedly Plotting to Kill Fidel
News from Cuba | Friday, 20 January 2012
From the Miami Herald
Former CIA agent Luis Posada Carriles may have beaten charges in Texas last year, but the aging anti-communist operative ain't in the clear just yet.
A Panamanian lawyer requested his extradition today on charges that he plotted to kill then-Cuban president Fidel Castro while in Panama back in 2000.
Carriles was controversially pardoned in 2004 by Panamanian president Mireya Moscoso. Bizarrely, Moscoso met with Carriles this week in Miami just as a Panama court upheld the sentence against the Cuban.
Posada Carriles was acquitted of perjury and immigration charges last year in Texas. Documents released during the trial show that he earned $300 a month from the CIA even
as he fooled agents into thinking that he was under their control.
In reality, he was plotting his own operations anti-Castro operations.Before working for the CIA, Posada Carriles participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion, was an officer in the US Army, and moved to Venezuela in 1976 to head American intelligence in the country. He was arrested the same
year and accused of masterminding an attack on a Cuban airliner that killed 76 people, but escaped before going on trial.He was
arrested again in 2001 in Panama for planning to kill Fidel Castro with 200 pounds of dynamite and C-4 explosives. He was convicted in 2004 but pardoned by Moscoso. Posada Carriles then made his way to the U.S.But critics argue that Moscoso's pardon was unconstitutional. The conviction was upheld on Saturday, and today lawyer Julio Berrio petitioned the Panamanian government to request Posada Carriles's
extradition from the U.S.Meanwhile, Moscoso appeared on
television on Tuesday and admitted that she met with the accused terrorist days before in Miami. "I am proud that I let them out of jail," she said.
"I haven't reached the end of the road; the nature of the struggle has changed, but it is still the same," Posada Carriles said after his acquittal in Texas last year.
