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Havana, September 14, 2006
Mr. Alberto Gonzalez United States Attorney General:
My name is Giustino Di Celmo. I am an 86-year-old man, and with indignation my family and I read in the papers that Judge Norbert Garney recommended the release of Luis Posada Carriles from immigration detention in El Paso, Texas. If you do not intervene, in a few days this criminal could be freed from jail. We cannot understand how the decision was possibly made to free one of the world’s most notorious terrorists, on exactly the same day that the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers was being commemorated. It seems to be a mockery to the pain of all of us who have been victimized by acts of terror.
My wife and I live with the pain of having lost Fabio, the youngest of our children, to one of the bombs that Luis Posada Carriles had planted in a Havana hotel. As published in The New York Times on September 12 and 13, 1998, Posada Carriles admitted to his having paid a Salvadoran mercenary to place the bomb in the Copacabana Hotel. During the interview, when the journalist asked him if he felt sorry for Fabio’s death, without reservation he said “No. The Italian was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I sleep like a baby.”
The man who uttered these words —the confessed murderer of my son— is the one who they now want to set free. Dear sir; we do not wish revenge – we ask for justice. You can make the decision to keep this terrorist in prison and have him tried for his numerous crimes, by those who demand that he be handed over to justice.
If you have children you will be better positioned to understand this plea we make before you.
Giustino Di Celmo
