The Justice Department announced charges on Wednesday against Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old former president of Cuba, accusing him of murder and a conspiracy to kill American citizens stemming from the fatal downing 30 years ago of two planes over waters off the coast of his country.
The indictment, issued in Federal District Court in Miami, was an extraordinary escalation of the Trump administration’s multifaceted pressure campaign against Cuba’s Communist government at a moment when President Trump has been seeking to topple it.
The charges brought to bear on Mr. Castro, the brother of Fidel Castro, the vast powers of the U.S. criminal justice system, saddling him with a possible maximum penalty of life in prison. They also raised the possibility that the United States could be paving the way for its military to remove him from the country through a means similar to how U.S. Special Operations forces used an indictment against Nicolás Maduro, the former leader of Venezuela, to swoop into Caracas in a brazen operation in January and capture him.
The indictment, which also accused five fighter pilots involved in the attack on the planes, was secretly returned last month by a federal grand jury and built on earlier charges, first filed in 2003, against one of them.
At a news conference in Miami, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, and Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, accused Mr. Castro and the pilots of killing four people when the Cuban military shot down the planes on the afternoon of Feb. 24, 1996. The planes were operated by Brothers to the Rescue, a Cuban exile group that often scoured the seas for Cubans fleeing the country.
Fidel Castro took responsibility for downing the planes shortly after they were brought from the sky, claiming that the organization had been dropping anti-regime leaflets over Havana in earlier flights. The indictment said that Raúl Castro was also responsible because he and his brother were “the final decision makers” in the Cuban military chain of command.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
