CASTRO ACCUSED OF ROLE IN DRUG TRAFFICKING

Two Cuban exiles and a French photographer have lodged formal complaints
with a Paris court against the Cuban president, Fidel Castro, accusing him
of international drug trafficking and crimes against humanity, their lawyer
said yesterday.

Serge Lewisch said he had filed the complaints on behalf of Ileana de la
Guardia, the daughter of a former Cuban army colonel executed in 1989 in a
drug-smuggling scandal; Pierre Golendorf, a French photographer imprisoned
in Cuba for three years; and Lazaro Jordana, a Cuban artist who also spent
four years in jail.

The suit is the latest high-profile human rights case brought against a
foreign leader in France, and follows the detention in London in October of
the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Judges investigating the disappearance of French nationals in Chile have so
far issued two international arrest warrants for Gen Pinochet, and are
currently studying complaints of torture and murder against the deposed
Haitian ruler Jean-Claude 'Baby Doc' Duvalier.

Mr Lewisch said Mr Golendorf, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison in
1971 while working on a book on Cuba, and Mr Jordana, who was given 20
years in 1980 for trying to flee the country, had suffered physical and
psychological torture.

Mr Jordana was detained in a cell two yards square, with no mattress or
running water. Campaigns by Amnesty International eventually secured both
men's release. Because of the gravity of the accusations, a judge will be
required to open an investigation, but French legal experts say Dr Castro
is unlikely to be charged with crimes against humanity because his status
as head of state guarantees his immunity.

In November a Spanish court declined to hear accusations that he was guilty
of genocide, terrorism and torture. But the French allegation of drug
trafficking could meet with greater success: under French law foreign
leaders normally enjoy immunity only for acts directly related to the
sovereignty of their state.

'If it can be proven, there is certainly a case,' one legal expert said.
'Drug smuggling is manifestly not part of the job description of a head of
state.' De la Guardia was one of four senior Cuban military officers,
including the revolutionary hero General Arnaldo Ochoa Sanchez, executed by
firing squad on July 13 1989. They were found guilty of embezzlement and
helping Colombia's Medellin drug cartel smuggle 6 tons of cocaine into the
United States.

The scandal, the biggest since Cuba's revolution in 1959, followed years of
steadily mounting evidence from the US intelligence services that Cuba had
become a major conduit for cocaine and marijuana, and that the Castro
regime was using the illegal revenue to break the US trade embargo and fund
its military operation in Angola.

President Castro has always vehemently denied that his country is engaged
in drug trafficking. But Mr Lewisch said his client, Ms de la Guardia, had
strong and previously unheard evidence that the Cuban leader was aware of
the drug trafficking all along, that the operation had been officially
sanctioned, and that her father and his fellow officers had been sacrificed
as scapegoats to international opinion.

He said she had not spoken out before because of fears for her father's
twin brother, Patricio, who is still in jail in Havana.