The leader and last remaining member of the Symbionese
Liberation Army — a radical group that committed politically motivated crimes in the United States in the 1970s — was arrested in Cape Town on Friday evening.
Police representative Mary Martins-Engelbrecht said James Kilgore (55) had been on the run from the FBI for the past 26 years. South African police traced him to his home in Claremont, Cape Town, and arrested him about 7.15pm.
Kilgore had been living in Cape Town for the last five years under the name Charles Pape. He is wanted for murder, armed robbery and illegal possession of destructive devices. The last charge refers to homemade bombs.
Martins-Engelbrecht said it was thought that Kilgore had been in Zimbabwe before he moved to South Africa. South African police began searching for him at Interpol’s request about three months ago.
The most notorious of the SLA’s crimes was the kidnapping of American newspaper heiress Patty Hearst in 1974. The SLA brainwashed Hearst into joining them. She was convicted of bank robbery committed while part of the SLA, but was later pardoned by
then-president Gerald Ford.
The New York Times reported on Friday that four former members of the Symbionese Liberation Army pleaded guilty to murder on Thursday.
They were charged in the shotgun killing of Myrna Opsahl, a 42-year-old woman gunned down in the holdup of a Crocker National Bank branch in Carmichael, just north of Sacramento, on April 21, 1975.
The defendants, who will receive six to eight years in prison each, are William Harris; his ex-wife, Emily Montague; Michael Bortin; and Sara Jane Olson, who is already in prison serving 14 years for a botched effort to blow up two Los Angeles police cars
in 1975.
The Times said Kilgore was also wanted in the Sacramento robbery and murder.
The SLA thought of their crimes as revolutionary justice on behalf of racial minorities in the US.
Martins-Engelbrecht said Kilgore was expected to appear in the Wynberg Magistrate’s Court on Monday. A formal extradition request was expected to follow. – Sapa