Foreign Minister Jose Vicente Rangel has said the ministry...

Foreign Minister Jose Vicente Rangel has said the ministry was studying the court records on Posada Carriles to determine whether there were judicial grounds to request his extradition. Posada Carriles, 72, was arrested at a Panama hotel after Fidel Castro accused him and three others of planning to assassinate him. Castro has demanded that the anticommunist activist be extradited to Cuba, where he was convicted in absentia for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner that killed 73 people. Former Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez, who decided to try Posada Carriles here in 1976, said he believed the exile shouldn't be sent to Cuba. "To hand over a prisoner to Cuba is to condemn him to death," he said. "We don't believe in the death penalty, and we don't have the death penalty."