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05/17/2005:

"US terror arrest after Castro rally"

A man accused of masterminding the blowing-up of a Cuban airliner off Barbados in 1976 which killed 73 people was arrested in Miami yesterday.
Luis Posada Carriles's arrest came hours after the Cuban president, Fidel Castro, led a march by an estimated 1.2 million people on Havana's US diplomatic mission calling for his extradition.

Mr Posada emerged from hiding for a blitz of media interviews after slipping into the US from Mexico two months ago.

Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's president and a close ally of the Cuban president, asked Washington to extradite Mr Posada, who has Venezuelan citizenship and who lived there at the time of the bombing, last week.
Until last night, when he was taken into custody by immigration authorities, the US had made no apparent moves to detain him since his lawyer said a month ago that he was in the country. But the homeland security department said it did not normally return people to Cuba or to countries acting on Cuba's behalf.

Interviewed in the Miami Herald yesterday, Mr Posada denied any involvement in the 1976 bombing, but did not confirm or deny a role in bombings of hotels in Cuba in 1997 in which an Italian died.

Mr Posada was freed last August from a Panamanian prison when he was pardoned over a plot to kill Mr Castro in 2000, and, since entering the US via a people-smuggler, has applied for political asylum.

The presence of Mr Posada, a former CIA collaborator, has forced Washington to choose between an anti-terrorism stance and backing for Cuban exiles. Over the past five weeks, Mr Castro has charged the US with hypocrisy in 16 live televised speeches, each lasting up to four hours.
Full: guardian.co.uk