Cuba has acknowledged that US cooperation in regional anti-terrorist efforts managed in 1998 to thwart plans by an anti-Castro group to blow up an airliner in mid-flight.
"That is why we are disclosing these exchanges, since they effectively show that the government of President (Bill) Clinton was concerned and took heed of the problem," said a declassified government document read late Thursday on Cuban television.
Cuba had expressed its suspicion that US-based anti-Castro groups were plotting terrorist attacks by means of a meeting in May 1998 between Colombian Nobel prize-winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez and US advisors, the document said.
The document added that Washington then sent experts to several Central American countries and a team of FBI agents to Havana to gather more information on the reports.
The anti-Castro group had planned to blow up either a Cuban airliner, or a commercial airliner flying between a Central American country and Cuba, according to the documents.
According to Cuban television, dissident Luis Posada Carriles -- whom Cuban leader Fidel Castro accused of being behind a plot to assassinate him on a recent trip to Panama -- was the mastermind behind the airliner plot.
Carriles is currently under arrest in Panama -- HAVANA (AFP)
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
