Cuba says U.S. broke anti-terrorism treaties

(Adds Posada telephone calls published in Cuba)

By Anthony Boadle

HAVANA, May 11 (Reuters) - Cuba accused the United States

on Friday 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 the 1976 downing of a Cuban plane that killed 73

people.

"The U.S. government should have tried Posada Carriles for

terrorism," Cuba said in a statement that deplored the freeing

of the accused bomber after a U.S. 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," said the

statement published in the Communist Party newspaper Granma.

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.

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.

Venezuela, Cuba's leftist ally, requested his extradition

from the United States in 2005, but got no response.

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 Cuban hotels and nightclubs

to sabotage Cuba's tourism industry in 1997. A Italian tourist

was killed.

By not prosecuting Posada Carriles for his violent past,

the United States had failed to comply with U.N. Resolution

1373, a wide-ranging counter-terrorism adopted after the Sept.

11 attacks, among other international conventions, Cuba said.

INDICTMENT TO COME?

The Cuban exile could yet be indicted on terrorism charges

in the United States by a federal grand jury 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 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

funded by Cuban exiles in Miami. He later denied saying so.

On Friday, Cuba published transcripts of telephone calls it

said Posada Carriles made from El Salvador in 1997 to an

associate in Venezuela about the Havana blasts.

"We have two more explosions: we placed one in the Sol

Palmeras Hotel in Varadero and the other in a discotheque in

Havana," Posada Carriles said, according to the transcripts

published by Granma. It did not say how they were obtained but

said they were passed to the FBI as evidence.

Cuba has displayed 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.