Madrid, Oct 4 (Prensa Latina) The Speaker of the Cuban Parliament Ricardo Alarcon described the Texas judge´s justification for refusing to extradite terrorist Luis Posada Carriles to Venezuela as a "maneuver" to divert public attention.

In an interview with Prensa Latina, Alarcon said that the situation regarding Posada Carriles remains as it was on the first day, a confesed criminal is still being harboured by Washington.

He recalled that since mid-March this convicted, confessed terrorist that should have been extradited to Venezuela has remained in US territory.

However, the US Republican government has yet to take one step to deal with the extradition request, and instead it invented immigration proceedings before a "so-called" judge, who is nothing more than a government official of the US Justice Department, who then declares he will not allow the extradition.

Cuba´s top legislator wondered rhetorically, "Who is he to say that?" and explained that such a decision is up to a Federal court, a court of justice, but the case has not been brought before any court.

What they have presented is a farce to deceive the public with a gentleman who is neither a judge nor represents any court´s ruling, but a member of the government that had already announced the decision to not extradite him to Venezuela.

Yet, he said, international treaties require them to do this because anti-terrorist agreements are very clear. No one who has been accused of a terrorist act against a civilian airplane can fail to be tried, and Washington is preventing Posada Carriles from being tried for this crime.

There is no alternative: either it extradites him or tries him as if the blowing up was in US territory and the victims were US people. This is what the agreements say, he explained.

Of course, we prefer him to be tried in Venezuela and not in the US, because one must recognize that the criminal has remained a fugitive of Venezuelan justice for the last 20 years, and because we have more confidence in Venezuelan integrity and their way of seeing that justice is done.

The fact remains, he said, that the US government would never accuse Posada Carriles because it has been his master, mainly the Bush family.

The current President´s father, he recalled, pursued this tactic in 1989 with another confessed criminal, Orlando Bosch, when he arrived in the US. The issue was presented as a migratory one, and so he was only held in prison for a while, to be sent home later, and finally Bush, Senior pardoned him.

Now they are doing the same thing with his cohort. But this time things have been more difficult because there has been more publicity. There is the anti-terrorism alert and the people´s rejection of this scourge. It remains to be seen if this time they can pull it off again, Alarcon said.