Castro: Cuba, U.S. Once Shared Terror Info
20.05.2005, 23:59
HAVANA - Cuba and the United States shared extensive information in hotel bombings and other terrorist attempts in the late 1990s, President Fidel Castro said Friday, adding that the past collaboration has been forgotten in the current case involving militant Luis Posada Carriles. Speaking to several thousand government supporters gathered for his evening address, Castro read extensively from declassified Cuban documents that indicated frequent exchanges of information between the countries after the bombings of Cuban tourist installations in 1997.
One explosion killed a young Italian man. Posada, now being held in the United States on immigration charges, at one point acknowledged to involvement in the hotel bombings, but later recanted. Posada, picked up in Miami this week, is sought by Venezuela to be retried in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people. The 77-year-old Cuban born Posada, a naturalized Venezuelan citizen, denies the charges. Castro said that in May 1998, his friend Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez personally delivered a message to then U.S. President Bill Clinton's advisers alerting them to plans by violent exile groups to plant bombs on flights between Cuba and the United States.