Luis Posada’s long and winding road to justice
Luis Posada Carriles is scheduled to go on trial for immigration fraud in El Paso, Texas, on January 10, 2011. Here's the timeline of how he got there:
Luis Posada Carriles
April 13, 2005: Luis Posada’s lawyer says his client—who’d been pardoned in August 2004 after being convicted in a 2000 assassination plot against Fidel Castro in Panama and had reportedly entered the United States illegally the month before—will seek asylum because of his “well-founded fear of persecution” in Cuba.
May 17, 2005: Posada withdrew his application for asylum, but U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) then charged him that same day with illegally entering the United States. He was jailed in a federal immigration facility in El Paso, Texas.
September 26, 2005: A U.S. immigration judge ruled Posada could not be deported to Venezuela—where he was still wanted in connection with the 1976 bombing of Cubana Airlines flight 455 that killed 73 people—because he might face torture there.
January 11, 2007: a federal grand jury in Texas indicted Posada on seven counts for lying about how he entered the United States. He was transferred from immigration detention in El Paso to a county prison in New Mexico.
April 19, 2007: Posada was released from jail and allowed to return to Miami under house arrest to await his upcoming trial.
May 9, 2007: A federal judge in Texas dismissed the charges against Posada, arguing that the government had “mistranslated testimony from Posada and manipulated evidence.”
April 8, 2009: A federal grand jury returned a new 11-count indictment against Posada. This time he was accused of lying during immigration proceedings about his involvement in a series of hotel bombings in Havana in 1997, during which an Italian-Canadian businessman was killed. His trial on those charges—originally scheduled to begin in August 2009 has been rescheduled three times.
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To read Posada's selected terrorism rap sheet, click here.
Copyright 2011 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
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About
This is the site for What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five, collected research and other materials for an in-progress narrative nonfiction book about the Cuban Five by Stephen Kimber.
The Cuban Five were members of "La Red Avispa"—the Wasp Network—spies Havana dispatched to Florida in the early 1990s to infiltrate militant anti-Castro exile groups that Cuba believed were plotting terrorist attacks on its soil. The Cuban Five were arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to long prison terms in the United States.
In the United States, they are virtually unknown. In Cuba, they are heroes.
That’s the short version of the story. The long version is… well, more complicated... Stay tuned.
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