CUBA BREAKS TIES WITH PANAMA
Three of the plotters were Cuban-born U.S. citizens and on their release they flew directly to a small airport in Miami, where they were met by their families.
The Cuban government called Moscoso an "accomplice and protector of terrorism" and said in a statement that diplomatic relations with Panama were broken off indefinitely. Havana described the pardon as "an affront to the victims of terrorism and their families" an said history would hold Moscoso responsible for "new crimes these abominable assassins commit in the future."
The pardoned men were among six sentenced in April for their part in a failed attempt to bomb a University of Panama auditorium where Castro was due to speak during a summit of Iberian and Latin American leaders. Among those freed was prominent anti-Castro activist Luis Posada, who escaped in the 1980s from a Venezuelan jail where he faced charges of planning the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people. Posada is not a U.S. citizen so he did not travel to Miami, and it was unclear where he was.
Moscoso said she freed the four because they were convicted for relatively minor crimes rather than attempted murder and denied suggestions that the United States had pushed her into it.
"I knew that if these men stayed here, they would be extradited to Cuba and Venezuela and there they were surely going to kill them," she told a news conference.
A Panamanian court in April sentenced the exiles to prison terms of seven and eight years on charges of endangering public safety and falsifying documents. It ruled there was not enough evidence to try them on charges of attempted murder.
Moscoso said she received anonymous death threats after issuing the pardons. "There are threats against my life," she told reporters. "They have been calling to say they're going to kill me, but I'm not scared."
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