Cuban exile found guilty of terrorism in mock trial

HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuban law students declared former CIA operative Luis Posada Carriles guilty of terrorism on Tuesday in a symbolic trial of the anti-Castro militant who was recently freed in the United States.

A 10-page verdict read out in front of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana found Posada Carriles guilty of plotting the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people and a wave of bomb blasts at Havana tourist sites in 1997.

The students also blamed the U.S. government for training Posada Carriles to overthrow Fidel Castro in 1961 and failing to put him on trial for terrorism when he was arrested for illegally entering the United States in 2005.

A U.S. judge last week dismissed immigration fraud charges against the 79-year-old Cuban exile, enraging Cubans who want to see him brought to justice. Havana accused Washington of protecting him because of his past ties to the CIA.

During two days of hearings organized by the Communist Party's youth wing in a former tennis club, state security investigators presented evidence against Posada Carriles.

They showed how a group of Salvadorans and Guatemalans paid by Posada Carriles smuggled 24 kilos of plastic explosives into Cuba to place them in time bombs in hotels and nightclubs.

In one excerpt of a television interview with a Spanish language television station in Miami, Posada Carriles boasted that he recruited a Salvadoran who planted a bomb that killed an Italian tourist in Havana's Copacabana hotel.

"It is important that the world see that there is enough proof to put Posada Carriles on trial for terrorism," Interior Ministry Lt. Col. Roberto Hernandez told Reuters after giving testimony at the student trial.

"The United States should try him because the credibility of its government's war on terror has been undermined by this case," he said.

Posada Carriles could still face a U.S. indictment by a federal grand jury impaneled in Newark, New Jersey to determine his role in the 1997 bombings in Havana.

Cuba has "on several occasions" provided the FBI with evidence to pin the bombings on him, Hernandez said.