Friday, March 19, 2010

Adviser to Americans in Haiti is Captured

By MARC LACEY and IAN URBINA

Published: March 19, 2010

MEXICO CITY — The Dominican authorities said Friday that they had arrested Jorge Aníbal Torres Puello, who acted as a legal adviser for a group of American church members who were detained in Haiti on child abduction charges, even though he himself was wanted on trafficking charges in the United States and El Salvador.


Working with United States law enforcement agencies, the Dominican authorities detained Mr. Torres on Thursday night without incident in the parking lot of a McDonald’s in Santo Domingo, the officials said.


Mr. Torres, 32, who used a variety of aliases and falsely described himself as a lawyer, dropped out of sight in February after The New York Times questioned him about trafficking charges in El Salvador against someone with a similar name and a physical likeness.


When The Times showed Salvadoran police officials a photograph of Mr. Torres taken in Haiti after the earthquake, the authorities there began an investigation and contacted Interpol, which put out a notice for Mr. Torres’s capture.

Mr. Torres had fooled many people up until that point. Despite the arrest warrants against him, he flew into Port-au-Prince, Haiti, whose airport was under the control of the American military. He also passed along tips to journalists, some of which proved false. Though he had no law degree, he solicited tens of thousands of dollars from relatives of the 10 detained Americans and met with the Haitian judge handling the case.

In El Salvador, Mr. Torres is wanted on accusations of human trafficking and exploitation of minors for pornography and prostitution. In the United States, he faces accusations of smuggling immigrants in Vermont and of probation violations involving a fraud case in Pennsylvania.

“Hiding behind fake names or using phony identifications and passports will not protect those who prey on the most vulnerable in our societies,” John T. Morton, assistant secretary of homeland security for United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in a statement.


Mr. Torres remained at large for more than a month after his past run-ins with the law were made public.


Last week, Mr. Torres, who was born in New York and has joint American and Dominican citizenship, said in a telephone interview that he wanted to turn himself in but that he was fearful about entering a prison in El Salvador.


“I want to bring this thing to an end,” he said, suggesting not very convincingly that he was in Panama. “I can’t keep hiding like this.” In an earlier conversation he apologized for lying to a reporter about his law degree and his links to the human trafficking case in El Salvador.


Don O’Hearn, a spokesman for the United States Marshals Service, said that despite Mr. Torres’s claim that he had fled to Panama, he never actually left the Dominican Republic. American and Dominican investigators have been tracking him in the Dominican Republic for weeks while preparing a provisional Dominican arrest warrant for him.


Mr. Torres is likely to be extradited to the United States after he is processed through the Dominican justice system and given the chance to contest his extradition, Mr. O’Hearn said.


Marc Lacey reported from Mexico City and Ian Urbina from New York. Kitty Bennett contributed research from St. Petersburg, Fla.

Full story at www.nytimes.com

No comments:

Post a Comment