Today marks the 30th anniversary of the bombing of Cuban flight 455 which took the lives of all 73 people on board. It was the first and only mid-air bombing of a civilian airliner in the Western Hemisphere. Declassified U.S. documents implicate the anti-Castro Cuban exile and CIA operative Luis Posada Carriles in the bombing. Posada is currently in U.S. custody but the U.S. government has refused to extradite Posada to Cuba or Venezuela to face trial. He escaped from a Venezuelan prison in 1985 while awaiting a trial on appeal. Posada snuck into the United States 18 months ago after years of living in hiding in Latin America. He is being held in a Texas detention center. A federal judge recently ruled that Posada should be freed pending deportation but U.S. immigration officials said Thursday that Posada will remain in custody. Cuba has accused the Bush administration of having a double standard on prosecuting terrorists.

• Ricardo Alarcon, president of the Cuban National Assembly: “Thirty years after the crime in Barbados, we can clearly prove the responsibility of the U.S. government in this atrocious act of terrorism, still unpunished. Why? What explanation could there be for this obstinance in obstructing justice?”