Cuban ex-CIA agent acquitted in perjury case

Many in the local Miami Cuban community see Posada as a hero because of his anti-Castro work [GETTY]

An elderly Cuban former CIA operative accused of lying during a US immigration hearing was acquitted on all charges, with jurors taking just three hours to reach a verdict after enduring 13 weeks of often-delayed testimony.

Luis Posada Carriles, 83, broke out in a huge grin when the verdict was read on Friday and hugged all three of his attorneys simultaneously. One of the attorneys broke down in tears.

Across the aisle, the federal prosecutors who painstakingly built their case during the first 11 weeks by calling 23 witnesses, sat still.

“Anytime a jury has a case, there’s no telling what they might do. But we respect the jury’s decision,” Timothy Reardon, the assistant US attorney, said after the hearing in an El Paso, Texas, court.

Posada, who spent decades working as a CIA operative in communist Latin American, is public enemy No 1 in his homeland and is considered the nemesis of Fidel Castro, the former president of Cuba.

Prosecutors said Posada lied to immigration officials about how he sneaked into the US in 2005 and by denying he masterminded a series of hotel bombings in Cuba in 1997 that killed an Italian tourist and wounded 12 other people.

Posada said in a 1998 interview with the New York Times that he planned the attacks, but later recanted that.

The defence, which called just eight witnesses over eight days, maintained Posada should have been allowed to retire a hero in Miami for his service to the country during the darkest days of the Cold War.

Posada spent nearly two years in immigration detention centres but was released in 2007 and had been living in Miami.

Posada participated in the doomed Bay of Pigs invasion, served as a Second Lieutenant in the US army and was a CIA operative until 1976. He then moved to Venezuela and served as head of that country’s intelligence service.

Also in 1976, he was arrested for planning the bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people. Posada was acquitted by a military tribunal, but escaped from prison while still facing a civilian trial.

He helped the US funnel support to Nicaraguan Contra rebels in the 1980s, and, in 2000, was arrested in Panama amid a plot to kill Castro during a summit there.

He was pardoned by Panama’s president in 2004 and turned up in the US the following March.