Cuba cooperating in US case against ex-CIA agent (AP)

Tuesday, February 8, 2011 1:01 AM By dwi

EL PASO, Texas – Three officials from land are expected to declare in the U.S. effort of a past CIA operative and anti-communist militant accused of lying during migration hearings in Texas — a thin example of cooperation between digit governments paralyzed by more than a half century of frigid relations.

Two personnel officers and a land medical enquirer from land could begin testifying as primeval as weekday in the U.S. government's perjury housing against Luis Posada Carriles. The 82-year-old autochthonous of land spent a period using violence to modify communist semipolitical systems throughout dweller USA before hunt U.S citizenship in 2005.

Posada is not on effort for his Cold War past, however. Instead, U.S. prosecutors allege that during migration hearings in El Paso, Posada made simulated statements most how he reached American grime in March 2005 and unsuccessful to acknowledge thinking a series of 1997 bombings in Havana that killed an European tourist. Posada faces 11 counts of perjury, impediment and migration fraud.

Neither side in Posada's effort has released a witness list, but both the prosecution and the accumulation said privately weekday daytime that they wait land experts to begin testifying this week, perhaps as primeval as Tuesday. They hit divulged the obloquy of the three witnesses, but exclusive on the condition they not be publicised until they take the stand.

The three land officials are expected to discourse for the West Texas jury the modification of Fabio di Celmo, the European traveler killed when a assail moulding through the lobby forbid at the Copacabana Hotel in Havana's spiffy Miramar neighborhood. Posada admitted responsibility for the Havana hotel bombings in a 1998 discourse with The New royalty Times, saying they were meant to perceive land business but not kill anyone. He has since recanted.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone ruled terminal month that accumulation attorney Arturo Hernandez would be allowed to improve some issue most the quality of the land polity and its state-trained experts patch cross-examining the officials from Cuba. However, Cardone said Hernandez cannot put land and its semipolitical system on trial.

Hernandez had argued that he should be allowed to cross-examine the experts most the communist government's domination of every facets of life in Cuba, showing how land officials can be pressured into stretching the truth to boost their homeland's semipolitical objectives.

Posada is public enemy No. 1 in the island nation and is modify likened to Hitler on propaganda billboards.

Cuba and Venezuela would same to essay him for the 1997 hotel attacks as substantially as a 1976 airliner onslaught that killed 73 people, but a U.S. migration determine previously ruled Posada can't be dispatched to either land for emotion he could be tortured.

Posada participated indirectly in the U.S.-backed, ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of land in 1961 before connexion the U.S. military and becoming a CIA asset. In the 1980s, he helped Washington provide assistance to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. In 2000, he was arrested in Panama in a strategy to kill socialist during a regional summit there. He was pardoned in 2004.

Posada has been living in Miami since his promulgation from an U.S. migration detention edifice in El Paso in 2007.


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