Colombia said Tuesday it would seek the extradition of a former Israel Defense Forces officer convicted of training paramilitaries in the Andean country, who was arrested Monday by Russian police at Moscow's Domodedovo airport.
Yair Klein, 61, was sentenced in 2001 in absentia to 10 years in jail by a Colombian court for training recruits for paramilitaries in their brutal campaign to counter Latin America's oldest left-wing rebel insurgency.
Colombian Foreign Minister Fernando Araujo said the government would ask that Klein be extradited to carry out his sentence in the Andean country, where the disarming of illegal paramilitaries has helped ease violence.
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"Colombia's government is going to make a formal petition to the Russian Foreign Ministry, so he is sent here to pay his sentence," Araujo said.
In 1998, Colombian prosecutors accused Klein and three Israeli associates of providing paramilitary training in the Magdalena valley between 1987 and 1989 and also working as mercenaries for the Medellin drug cartel, a charge he denied.
Colombia said Klein was sentenced in 2001 to 10 years by a local court for instructing terrorist techniques and conspiring to commit a crime.
He said publicly at the time that ranking Colombian military officers were aware of his paramilitary training activities.
Interpol had tipped off Russia's Interior Ministry that Klein could attempt to travel to Moscow in August. He was detained when he arrived at the airport on Monday.
"To get through passport controls in many countries without any difficulties, he changed his date of birth, his surname and the passport number," a spokesman said.
Colombia's paramilitary movement began in the 1980s when wealthy landowners banded together for protection against attacks, kidnapping and extortion by leftist guerrillas in rural areas where state presence was weak.
But the militia groups soon turned to drug trafficking and kidnapping as they snatched land and killed peasants in the name of counter-insurgency.
Aided by billions of dollars in U.S. funding, President Alvaro Uribe has led a crackdown on rebels and negotiated the disarmament of the paramilitary movement. The rebels are still fighting, aided by finances from the country's drug trade
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