U.S. fugitive wants to serve time in Portugal

LISBON, Portugal — An American killer and alleged hijacker who was a fugitive for 41 years should serve the rest of his jail time in Portugal where he was captured instead of being extradited to the United States, his lawyer says.

George Wright, 68, deserves to serve the remainder of his 15- to 30-year New Jersey murder sentence in Portugal because he has lived in the country for decades, has a Portuguese wife and grown Portuguese children, said the lawyer, Manuel Luis Ferreira.

“If he has to serve, then he wants it to be here, which is his home,” Ferreira told Portugal’s TVI television late Thursday.

Wright broke out of the Bayside State Prison in Leesburg, New Jersey, on Aug. 19, 1970 after serving eight years for killing a man in a 1962 gas station robbery. He then was part of a Black Liberation Army group that hijacked a U.S. plane to Algeria in 1972.

Wright was captured in a seaside village near Lisbon on Monday after authorities matched his fingerprint on a Portuguese identity card to one in the United States.

The lawyer also said Wright will oppose extradition on the grounds that he fears reprisals for his past membership of a militant black group in the United States. He did not elaborate.

Ferreira did not outline his legal strategy for trying to prevent Wright from being extradited to face charges in the hijacking, and did not return messages left Friday at his office seeking comment.

Hijacking in the United States carries a possible penalty of life in prison, and Portugal does not allow people to be extradited if they will face more than the nation’s maximum sentence of 25 years.

Under Portuguese law, citizens can serve sentences handed down in a foreign country in Portugal.

However, Portuguese officials say there is doubt about the validity of Wright’s identification documents and whether he is a national. They declined to provide details because public access to information about court cases is restricted.

A photocopy of a Portuguese identity card issued to Wright in 1993 listed his home country as Guinea-Bissau, where he lived in the 1980s. A foreigner marrying a Portuguese is entitled to Portuguese nationality, but has to formally request it. It is not known whether Wright did so.

While on the run, the FBI said Wright joined an underground militant group, the Black Liberation Army, and lived with several of its members in Detroit.

Wright — dressed as a priest and using an alias — is accused of hijacking a Delta flight from Detroit to Miami in 1972 along with four other Black Liberation Army members and three children, including Wright’s companion and their 2-year-old daughter.

Wright arrived in Portugal in 1978, his attorney said. Wright also spent years in the 1980s living openly under his own name in Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony in West Africa.

Wright’s children, said to be in their early 20s, knew nothing about his past until his capture this week, Ferreira said.

Ferreira, Wright’s attorney, said his client had been living openly in Portugal and even had a Facebook page.

“He wasn’t running. He wasn’t hiding,” Ferreira told TVI.

He said he marveled at Wright’s saga, which covered three continents and four decades.

“This story would make a television series. I’m still trying to digest it myself,” he said.

Wright is being held in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, pending extradition hearings and will likely remain in detention for at least several weeks during the hearings, according to the president of the Lisbon court overseeing the case. Wright has asked to be released during the process, a request that is still pending.

If he loses the case, he can appeal the extradition decision to Portugal’s Supreme Court and the country’s Constitutional Court, a process likely to last months or even years, the judge, Luis Maria Vaz das Neves, told the AP.

A recent high-profile extradition case involving an Indian terror suspect took years to resolve.

Abu Salem, arrested in Portugal in September 2002, was a prime suspect in 1993 bombings that struck Bombay, killing 257 people and wounding more than 1,100. He was extradited three years later after his appeals to higher courts failed.

But to get Portugal to extradite Salem, India had to promise to forgo the death penalty and impose a prison term of 25 years or less if he’s convicted, Indian officials said.

Wright was convicted of the 1962 murder of a gas station owner in Wall, New Jersey.

In the 1972 hijacking, Wright and the other BLA members released the plane’s 86 other passengers for a $1 million ransom. They then forced the plane to fly to Boston, then onto Algeria, where the hijackers sought asylum. Algeria returned the plane and the money to the United States but allowed the hijackers to stay.

Wright and the other hijackers left Algeria in late 1972 or early 1973 and settled in France, according to Mikhael Ganouna, producer of the 2010 documentary “Nobody Knows my Name” about the hijacking.

But Wright left the group, and his associates were subsequently tracked down, arrested and convicted in Paris in 1976. The French government, however, refused to extradite them to the United States.

Wright has not been charged in any country for the hijacking.