Fbi Agent Joins Search For Pang In Brazil But Arrest Can’t Take Place Until Warrant Clears Supreme Court

The FBI has sent an agent to Brazil to assist in the hunt for Seattle murder suspect Martin Pang, and Brazilian police say they’re ready to try to corral Pang as soon as the necessary paperwork clears diplomatic channels.

But Brazilian authorities say they can’t arrest him without a warrant in hand, and they’re worried Pang will flee to yet another country.

Pang is accused of arranging the Jan. 5 arson at a Seattle warehouse that killed four Seattle firefighters and destroyed his parents’ business in Seattle’s International District.

Aliani Collmann, a spokeswoman for the federal police in Rio de Janeiro, said Tuesday morning that police had not yet received the provisional arrest warrant they are expecting from Brazil’s Supreme Court in the capital of Brasilia.

“It is not possible at this moment to capture him, because we have to have the order of the court,” Collmann said.

Lucille de Palma, information officer at the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia, said the warrant had not yet been issued; she expected to be notified by Brazilian authorities when it was.

The FBI requested the warrant three weeks ago, according to a State Department source, indicating the FBI knew that Pang was in Brazil almost as soon as he arrived.

Pang didn’t show up for a scheduled arraignment in Seattle on Monday on the murder charges. He wasn’t expected to appear, but prosecutors staged the hearing anyway to add to their case that Pang is on the run because of his guilt. That could be used against him at trial.

An FBI agent based in Montevideo, Uruguay, arrived in Rio late last week to brief Brazilian police on the habits of the 39-year-old fugitive, said a source close to the investigation. The agent is from an FBI office attached to the U.S. Embassy in the Uruguayan capital.

One Brazilian police officer was already looking for Pang before the FBI arrived. The Brazilian officer, who serves as a liaison with the international police agency Interpol, got involved last Thursday after he was approached by a reporter from the newspaper Jornal do Brasil, who learned of the case from a Seattle Times reporter.

The officer - who did not want to be quoted by name - said he thinks Pang is hiding out in the resort area of Buzios, 100 miles north of Rio.

The officer said he is worried Pang will leave Brazil before the warrant is received by police. He said Pang is aware that police are looking for him because the Jornal do Brasil published a lengthy story about the hunt Saturday.

“I need the authorization from the government,” the officer said. “If I have something more, we can act.”

International manhunts can bog down in treaty law, said people familiar with the procedure.

The paperwork leading to a provisional arrest warrant was started by the Office of International Affairs in the department’s criminal division, Justice Department spokesman John Russell said. But he didn’t know when any kind of warrant would pop up in police computers in Brazil.

“It’s a very time-consuming matter,” Russell said.

The request goes from local law enforcement to the Justice Department; then to the State Department in Washington, D.C., then the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia, then the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, then the Brazilian Ministry of Justice, then to the Brazilian Supreme Court, and finally to the federal police who would try to find and arrest Pang.

Marilyn Brenneman, senior deputy King County prosecutor on the Pang case, said the warrant is out of the U.S. government’s control when it gets to Brazilian ministries.

Murder is among the crimes listed in the Brazil-United States extradition treaty. However, hitches do occur. In one case, a famous British train robber could not be extradited because he had married a Brazilian woman and fathered a Brazilian son.

A faster option might be for Brazil to simply expel Pang as an undesirable foreigner. That could be done because of criminal assertions in the murder charges, or possibly even because he put a false home address and false work phone number on his visa application, State Department spokesman Lee McClenny said.