TEARFUL REUNION FOR NORTH VANCOUVER FAMILY

Charges Dropped Against Pavel Kulisek After 3 Years Without
Trial

A North Vancouver father and husband was reunited with his family at
Vancouver International Airport Thursday after spending more than
three years in a Mexican jail without trial.

Pavel Kulisek, 46, disembarked from an afternoon flight, embraced his
wife and two young daughters and headed home to North Vancouver.

"I am happy to be back home with my family and grateful for all the
generous support we have received," he said in a statement posted
online. "I look forward to putting this terrible experience behind me
and getting back to a normal life."

The reunion came two days after a Mexican judge cleared Kulisek of
drug trafficking and gang charges, citing lack of evidence, and
ordered him released from prison.

Kulisek's ordeal began in March 2008, a few months after the family
had moved to Los Barriles on Mexico's Baja Peninsula, when police
raided a restaurant where he was dining with another man who turned
out to be Gustavo Rivera Martinez, a major figure in the Tijuana drug
trade. Kulisek was charged with drug trafficking and membership in a
criminal organization, and thrown in jail.

From the beginning, Kulisek and his family have insisted he was guilty
of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They
claimed the North Vancouverite had not realized Martinez's real
identity until the raid. Rather, Kulisek said he had met and
befriended the man through the bike-racing circuit, and that he had
been led to believe his name was Carlos Herrera.

For the following three years, Kulisek was confined to a
2.5metre-by-four-metre cell for 22 hours a day, with his only breaks
being for meals and a three-hour respite each week to play dominoes
and another hour to paint.

While he languished in prison, his supporters waged a protracted legal
battle to get him free. They staged rallies and fundraisers and
lobbied government on his behalf.

The trafficking charge against Kulisek was finally dropped last year,
but the charge of membership in organized crime was harder to deal
with, as his case could not be addressed until it was separated from
Martinez's and that of another man who was arrested at the same time.

In March this year, Kulisek was told his application to be tried on
his own had hit a snag, that a judge wouldn't be able to review it for
another eight months, and that it wouldn't go to trial for at least
another four months after that.

Despairing, Kulisek tried to kill himself. The authorities then moved
him to a psychiatric facility.

Things turned around abruptly this week, however, when a judge
reviewed his case and threw out the last of the charges.

Kulisek's wife, Jirina Kuliskova, thanked the people who had made the
outcome possible.

"I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to those who have
supported and helped Pavel and our family during our painful journey
over the past three years," she said in the statement. "Without all of
you, my girls and I would not have survived this terrible ordeal.

Asked what they were going to do next, she said they had no concrete
plans, but that she hoped to take the family camping.