[Osx-nutters] Bombing of Cuban Jetliner 30 Years Later: National Security Archive Update, October 5, 2006

[Kevin Callahan]

National Security Archive Update, October 5, 2006

BOMBING OF CUBAN JETLINER 30 YEARS LATER

New Documents on Luis Posada Posted as Texas Court Weighs Release  
from Custody

Colgate Toothpaste Disguised Plastic Explosives in 1976 Terrorist Attack

Confessions, Kissinger Reports, and Overview of Posada Career Posted

http://www.nsarchive.org

For more information contact:
Peter Kornbluh - 202/994-7000
email - peter.kornbluh at gmail.com

Washington, DC, October 5, 2006 - On the 30th anniversary of the  
first and only mid-air bombing of a civilian airliner in the Western  
Hemisphere, the National Security Archive today posted on the Web new  
investigative records that further implicate Luis Posada Carriles in  
that crime of international terrorism. Among the documents posted is  
an annotated list of four volumes of still-secret records on Posada's  
career with the CIA, his acts of violence, and his suspected  
involvement in the bombing of Cubana flight 455 on October 6, 1976,  
which took the lives of all 73 people on board, many of them teenagers.

The National Security Archive, which has sought the declassification  
of the Posada files through the Freedom of Information Act, today  
called on the U.S. government to release all intelligence files on  
Posada. "Now is the time for the government to come clean on Posada's  
covert past and his involvement in international terrorism," said  
Peter Kornbluh, who directs the Archive's Cuba Documentation Project.  
"His victims, the public, and the courts have a right to know."

Posada has been in detention in El Paso, Texas, for illegal entry  
into the United States, but a magistrate has recommended that he be  
released this week because the Bush administration has not certified  
that he is a terrorist.

Among the documents posted today are four sworn affidavits by police  
officials in Trinidad and Tobago, who were the first to interrogate  
the two Venezuelans--Hernan Ricardo Lozano and Freddy Lugo--who were  
arrested for placing the bomb on flight 455. (Their statements were  
turned over as evidence to a special investigative commission in  
Barbados after the crime.) Information derived from the  
interrogations suggested that the first call the bombers placed after  
the attack was to the office of Luis Posada's security company ICI,  
which employed Ricardo. Ricardo claimed to have been a CIA agent (but  
later retracted that claim). He said that he had been paid $16,000 to  
sabotage the plane and that Lugo was paid $8,000.

The interrogations revealed that a tube of Colgate toothpaste had  
been used to disguise plastic explosives that were set off with a  
"pencil-type" detonator on a timer after Ricardo and Lugo got off the  
plane during a stopover in Barbados. Ricardo "in his own handwriting  
recorded the steps to be taken before a bomb was placed in an  
aircraft and how a plastic bomb is detonated," deputy commissioner of  
police Dennis Elliott Ramdwar testified in his affidavit.

These and other documents on this case can be found on the Web site  
of the National Security Archive:

http://www.nsarchive.org

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