Panama: 183 pardons awarded by then-President Mireya Moscoso declared unconstitutional

EFE News Service: The Panama Supreme Court has declared unconstitutional the 183 pardons awarded by then-President Mireya Moscoso in the waning days of her 1999-2004 term, including that of Cuban exile militant Luis Posada Carriles, accused of plotting to assassinate Fidel Castro during a summit meeting here.
"The judges all agreed that the pardons were irregular," the high court said in a statement issued Monday night.

The verdict "is retroactive in effect and leaves without legal support all procedural or judicial steps taken as a result of those decisions, which is to say that the cases must return to their original state," the judges said.

Among those pardoned were Posada Carriles and three other anti-Castro Cubans -- Gaspar Jimenez, Guillermo Novo and Pedro Remon -- who had been convicted of various offenses in connection with a plot to kill Castro during the 2000 Ibero-American Summit in Panama. The Supreme Court had been reviewing a motion since 2004 brought by state prosecutors challenging the constitutionality of all the pardons that Moscoso awarded just days before handing over power to successor Martín Torrijos.

Moscoso pardoned the Cubans on Aug. 25, 2004, and the four left Panama the next day on a private plane after a quick police operation to hustle them out of prison. Under Torrijos, Cuba and Panama agreed to re-establish consular relations after Havana broke off diplomatic ties on Aug. 26 because of the pardon given the militants. Almost a year later, diplomatic relations were fully restored.

While his three comrades received a hero's welcome from Florida's Cuban exile community, Posada disappeared soon after leaving the prison in Panama and did not resurface until March 2005, when he was arrested in Miami by U.S. immigration for illegally entering the country. U.S. authorities eventually charged Posada, a Cuban-born Venezuelan citizen who headed the Andean nation's secret police for a time in the 1960s and '70s, of lying when he said he entered the country by land at the Mexico-Texas border.

Venezuela and Cuba accuse Posada of planning the bombing of Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 on Oct. 6, 1976, an attack that left 73 dead. The U.S. government has denied Venezuela's request to extradite Posada, an 80-year-old former CIA operative who is also accused in a series of bombings at Havana hotels in 1997 that resulted in the death of an Italian tourist. Posada, now at an undisclosed "safe" location in Miami, was supposed to have gone on trial last year in Texas for lying to U.S. immigration officials, but a federal judge threw out the charges.

Earlier, a federal magistrate had ruled that he could not be sent to Venezuela because he might be tortured, an allegation Caracas denies. Declassified U.S. intelligence documents highlight FBI and CIA suspicions that Posada was involved with the 1976 airliner bombing. Posada escaped from custody in Venezuela in 1985 while awaiting a second trial in that case.