Author: Anti-Cuba group planned 14 crashes

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HAVANA, Oct. 7 (UPI) -- Anti-Castro U.S. terrorists laid plans to fatally sabotage 14 Cuban airliners over a 29-year span, an author alleges.

Jose Luis Mendez, who has authored several books on anti-Castro militants, said his investigation revealed that Cuban-American plotters based in Miami not only caused the Oct. 6, 1976, crash of a Cuban passenger airliner over Barbados -- killing 73 people -- but also planned to sabotage 13 other planes between 1959 and 1998, the Communist Party newspaper Granma reported Tuesday.

The Barbados crash was the only sabotage successfully carried out, Mendez alleged.

"The U.S. authorities know that international terrorist Orlando Bosch Avila and his organization (of which Luis Posada Carriles is a member) hatched the plot to blow up this plane," Mendez said. "This is not only backed up by investigations undertaken in Cuba: U.S. Associate Attorney General Joe Whitley, who analyzed hundreds of public documents and secret CIA and FBI files, concluded that (the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations) was responsible for the attack and the top leader of this terrorist group is Bosch."

Mendez told Granma the fact that Bosch and Carriles are free in Miami indicates "double standards of the U.S. authorities when it comes to their terrorists."