Cuba says US broke anti-terrorism treaties

HAVANA, May 11 (Reuters) Cuba accused the United States today of violating international anti-terrorism treaties by failing to prosecute an anti-Castro militant and former CIA operative wanted for bomb attacks against the country.

Cuba said Washington should have arrested Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles under its own Patriot Act as a security threat and called for his extradition to Venezuela to stand trial for plotting from Caracas the downing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people in 1976.

''The US government should have tried Posada Carriles for terrorism,'' Cuba said in a statement that deplored the freeing of the accused bomber in United States after a US judge dismissed immigration fraud charges against him on Tuesday.

''Let's see what the White House does now. It still has the option to fulfill its international obligations to detain Luis Posada Carriles and extradite him to Venezuela,'' the statement published in the Communist Party newspaper Granma said.

Cuba said the immigration indictment was a ''smoke screen'' to avoid prosecuting Posada Carriles for acts of violence that would have revealed his links over 25 years to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Posada Carriles, 79, was arrested in Miami in 2005 after illegally entering the United States. Cuba also accuses him of plotting a wave of bomb blasts in Havana hotels and nightclubs that killed an Italian tourist in 1997.

By not prosecuting Posada Carriles for his violent past, the United States had failed to comply with UN Resolution 1373, a wide-ranging counter-terrorism adopted in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, among other international conventions, Cuba said.

The Cuban exile could yet be indicted on terrorism charges in the United States by a federal grand jury impaneled in Newark, New Jersey to determine his role in the 1997 Havana bombings, the Miami Herald reported last week.

The FBI took the unusual step of sending agents to Cuba to gather evidence late last year, the newspaper said.

In a 1998 interview, Posada Carriles told The New York Times he plotted the wave of bomb blasts from Central America.

He later denied saying so.

Trained by the CIA for its failed Bay of Pigs invasion to oust Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 1961, Posada Carriles was jailed in Venezuela for the 1976 bombing of the Cuban airliner, but escaped from prison in 1985.

He was jailed in Panama for plotting to blow up Castro during a regional summit in 2000, but was pardoned by outgoing President Mireya Moscoso in 2004.

Cuba has displayed in an exhibition hall evidence of the string of bombings allegedly masterminded by the man it calls Latin America's Osama bin Laden.

Photographs show plastic explosives smuggled into Cuba in shampoo bottles, digital clocks used to make time bombs and damages caused by the blasts. Targets included Havana's famed Tropicana cabaret and the Bodeguita del Medio, where writer Ernest Hemingway once drank his mojitos.

REUTERS AK HS2313