U.S. to probe FBI's role in militant's death

Associated Press, October 4, 2005

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- U.S. authorities will investigate an FBI operation that led to the killing of a Puerto Rican independence militant in a gunfight last month, an official said.

The Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General will investigate the September 23 slaying of Filiberto Ojeda Rios and interview the FBI agents as well as the Puerto Rican government, said Paul Martin, deputy inspector general in an interview with El Nuevo Dia, a local daily.

The FBI was widely criticized in the U.S. commonwealth after the slaying at a farmhouse in southeastern Puerto Rico of Ojeda Rios, shot to death by agents who came to arrest him in the 1983 robbery of a Wells Fargo armored truck depot in West Hartford, Connecticut.

The FBI said Ojeda Rios shot at agents first. Ojeda Rios' widow, who escaped from the farmhouse unharmed, alleged the FBI fired first.

Ojeda Rios, 72, was the leader of the militant pro-independent group Macheteros, or Cane Cutters, whose most notorious act was the $7.2 million Wells Fargo robbery.

He had been on the run for 15 years.