Nation in brief: Cuban cx-CIA operative released
Anti-Castro militant Luis Posada Carriles, an aging ex-CIA operative suspected in a decades-old Cuban airliner bombing, was released from U.S. custody Thursday and flew to Miami as he awaits trial on immigration fraud charges.
Posada was released from a New Mexico jail after posting bond and went to his wife’s house in Miami. He was required to post a $250,000 bond, and his wife, daughter and son were required to post a $100,000 bond to secure his release.
The 79-year-old former CIA operative is awaiting a May 11 trial on allegations that he lied to immigration authorities while trying to become a naturalized U.S. citizen.
Posada is wanted in his native Cuba and in Venezuela, where he is accused of plotting the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner that killed 73 people.
SELMER, Tenn.
Wife convicted in preacher’s shooting
A preacher’s wife who claimed her husband abused her was convicted of voluntary manslaughter Thursday for killing him with a shotgun she said fired accidentally as she aimed it at him.
Prosecutors had sought a first-degree murder conviction for Mary Winkler, but the jury settled on the lesser charge after deliberating for eight hours. She faces three to six years in prison but would be eligible for parole after serving about a third of the sentence.
Winkler told jurors Wednesday that her husband, Matthew, abused her physically and sexually, but she said she did not pull the trigger and the shotgun went off accidentally as she pointed it at him.
Matthew Winkler, a 31-year-old preacher, was found in the church parsonage shot in his back in March 2006. One day later, his wife was arrested on the Alabama coast, driving the family minivan with their three young daughters.
WASHINGTON
Immunity given for Haditha testimony
The only Marine officer at the scene of the attacks on residential homes in Haditha, Iraq, that left nearly two dozen civilians dead in 2005, has received immunity in the case. The move precludes Marine officials from charging him with a crime and paves the way for his eyewitness testimony in trials related to the slayings and alleged coverup.
Marine Corps Lt. Gen. James Mattis, who oversees the Haditha cases, approved immunity for Lt. William T. Kallop on April 3, according to documents obtained by the Washington Post. Kallop became the second central player in the shootings to be granted immunity, and he is expected to testify in hearings for seven Marines and officers charged in connection to the shootings.
Kallop arrived at the scene of a huge insurgent roadside bomb on Nov. 19, 2005, after one Marine was killed and two others ordered five civilians out of a white car and gunned them down. Kallop and other Marines said they came under small-arms attack from a nearby home.
Marines immediately stormed two houses and killed numerous men, women and children.