Scotland Yard Investigated Castro for Assassination
Published April 10, 2001, El Nuevo Herald
by Gerardo ReyesFidel Castro was considered one of the suspects in the murder of Liberal Colombian leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan by Scotland Yard detectives who investigated the case in July 1948, according to American investigator Paul Wolf.
Wolf filed a suit in federal court in Washington DC yesterday against the CIA and FBI to demand important information about the event that so radically changed the history of Colombia in the last 53 years.
One of the British detectives wrote in his report that the hypothesis that Castro particpated in the assassination of Gaitan was "possible but highly improbable."
The most compromising evidence against Castro, who was in Bogota as a member of a Cuban student delegation assisting the Latin American Students' Congress, indicated that the young man had meet in a cafeteria with Gaitan's assassin, Juan Roa Sierra, hours before he shot the politician in a central Bogota street.
Wolf said that the report of some 20 pages, prepated by Scotland Yard at the request of the Colombian government, he received from Maria Gaitan, the daughter of the leader who, for her part, obtained it from the historic archives of the legendary institution in London.
Norman Smith, the British investigator who signed the 19 page report, said that it was based principally on the reports of an unidentified Colombian detective who kept the 22 year old student leader under strict surveillance after he was arrested on the balcony of the Theater Colon.
The arrest occurred at 1030 in the evening on April 3rd as Castro, in the company of Rafael del Pino, another integral member of the student delegation, threw various communist pamphlets during a play attended by then-president of Colombia, Mariano Ospina.
The suspects were interrogated and later freed on the condition that they would return two days later to have their passports examined. When they did not appear on the designated day, the Colombian police searched the Hotel Claridge where the Cubans were staying, confiscated their passports and other documents, except for some love letters.
In his pursuit, the Colombian detective discovered that Castro and Del Pino had on the 9th of April, at 1100 in the morning, a conversation in the Cafe Colombia with a man having physical characteristics very similar to a photograph that appeared the following day in the newspapers, of the man who had been lynched by the excited mob.
The same night, according to declarations of the manager of the Hotel Claridge, the Cubans returned with arms and plunder from the looting that the city suffered, and all night long they were talking on the phone in their room in English.
The Scotland Yard detective said in his report to the Colombian government that the possibility could not be discarded that the Colombian investigator was influenced by the environment of the time, and under pressure of suspicions that had reappeared about the Cubans, he aired them to the press.
Translation by Paul Wolf