A group of US federal prosecutors is in Havana this week taping interviews with Cuban government officials that could be used in the trials of five Cubans due to be tried for espionage, court sources said Tuesday.
The interviews -- a rare example of high-level cooperation between the United States and communist-run Cuba, which do not have full diplomatic relations -- are to take place all week at the Swiss embassy in Havana, according to a spokesman at the Miami office of federal Judge Joan Lenard.
The five Cubans, arrested in 1998 in south Florida, are accused of belonging to a Cuban spy ring that would be the largest ever broken up in the United States.
They have maintained they were gathering information about Cuban exile groups suspected of carrying out terrorist attacks on the island.
The trial is scheduled to begin November 6 and the tapes of official Cuban testimony could be admitted into the proceedings, if Lenard wishes, the source said.
The five Cubans -- Gerardo Hernandez (also known by the alias Manuel Viramontes), Ruben Campa, Luis Medina, Antonio Guerrero and Rene Gonzalez -- are accused of spying on US military installations in south Florida.
Hernandez also is accused of having passed on to Cuban authorities the flight plan of the anti-Castro and migrant rescue group Brothers to the Rescue, two of whose Cessnas were shot down by a Cuban MiG fighter February 24, 1996. Three young Cuban-Americans and a Cuban US resident were killed -- MIAMI(AFP)
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