The United States government has formally requested the extradition of former Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) member James Kilgore, his lawyer said on Thursday.
The news comes ahead of Kilgore’s third appearance in Cape Town’s Wynberg Magistrates Court on Friday. He was arrested on November 8 at his home in the city, where he worked as an academic under the alias Charles Pape.
A week later, when there had still been no documentation from the United States, a magistrate ordered his release.
However, he was immediately rearrested on South African immigration charges. He was also arrested a third time while in detention on the basis of a warrant obtained by Interpol after a provisional extradition request from the US.
The lawyer, Michael Evans, said he received a copy of the formal request on Tuesday, after it was forwarded from the US embassy in Pretoria to prosecuting authorities in Cape Town.
He said a federal passport-related charge had been added to charges the US had previously listed: a federal charge of possession of an unlawful explosive device, and California state charges of murder and use of an unlicensed weapon in the commission of that murder.
It seems likely that Kilgore, whose legal team has repeatedly said he is fully prepared to stand trial in the US, will formally consent to the extradition on Friday.
His departure to the US will then depend on how long it takes justice minister Penuell Maduna to sign a document surrendering him to US authorities, but this is likely to happen within weeks rather than months.
Kilgore, who has a wife and children in Cape Town, was a respected researcher at the University of Cape Town’s International Labour Resource and Information Group.
He is wanted in the US for offences committed 27 years ago when he was a member of the radical SLA, an organisation best remembered for its kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst.
Four other SLA members recently pleaded guilty in a California court, and are to be sentenced in February.
They were charged in the shotgun killing of Myrna Opsahl, a 42-year-old woman gunned down in the hold-up of a Crocker National Bank branch in Carmichael, just north of Sacramento, in 1975.
Kilgore is being held in Goodwood Prison. – Sapa