Federal prosecutors in the United States were drafting a request to have one of the FBI’s most wanted criminals, a 27-year fugitive accused of a 1975 bank robbery and murder, extradited from South
Africa, an official said Sunday.
James Kilgore (55) who was a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army best known for kidnapping newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, was arrested Friday night in Cape Town.
The extradition request, which will be certified by the US justice and state departments before being forwarded to the South African government, would take between three and eight weeks to process, said Brian Penn, a representative for the US consulate in
Cape Town.
”A lot depends on whether (Kilgore) contends the extradition request or not,” he said. Kilgore spent the weekend in a cell at a Cape Town police station, pending his appearance in the Wynberg Magistrate’s court on Monday.
Mike Evans, his lawyer, declined to comment on the case. While Kilgore violated local immigration laws, police have indicated they would favour his extradition rather than have him prosecuted in South Africa.
Justice ministry representative Paul Setsetse said South African laws prevented Kilgore from being extradited if there was the possibility that he may be executed.
US officials said Kilgore was unlikely to face the death penalty. Police were told three months ago that Kilgore was hiding out somewhere in South Africa and eventually found him living under the alias Charles Pape in the wealthy Cape Town suburb of Claremont.
Kilgore received an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California at Santa Barbara and worked as a cook and house painter during his radical years. Now married with two children, Kilgore has worked at the University of Cape Town since 1998 as a senior researcher at the International Labour Resource and Information Group, which researched international and local labour issues.
Police believe Kilgore lived in Zimbabwe and then Johannesburg before moving to Cape Town. Kilgore had become a fugitive in 1975 to escape charges of
possession of explosives.
His arrest came just one day after four of his former comrades pleaded guilty to the murder of Myrna Opsahl, who was depositing a church collection when she was killed by a shotgun blast during the 1975 holdup of the Crocker National Bank in suburban Sacramento, California.
Kilgore and his four colleagues were charged in January with Opsahl’s murder. American law enforcement and defence attorneys had said Kilgore
had been communicating with authorities, seeking a plea deal similar to those the other defendants received. – Sapa-AP