admin1980s and even knew US embassy officials there, a former US ambassador said yesterday.
The comments by retired Guinea-Bissau Ambassador John Blacken raised new questions about the effectiveness of the FBI manhunt for George Wright, who managed to elude authorities for 41 years despite using his own name or the Portuguese variant of “Jorge”.
Blacken told The Associated Press he was stunned to hear about Wright’s arrest on Monday in Portugal because he knew him socially in Guinea Bissau but had no idea Wright was a fugitive.
He said embassy officials would have taken action if they had known Wright had escaped from jail in New Jersey while serving time for murder and was wanted in a 1972 hijacking by the radical Black Liberation Army of a US plane to Algeria.
“All this was a big surprise, my goodness, murder and everything else,” Blacken said in an phone interview from Bissau, the capital of Guinea-Bissau.
“No one imagined him being a murderer, of course we didn’t know him that well. He seemed like an ordinary person and not radical at all.”
A fingerprint contained on Wright’s Portuguese ID card was the break that led a US fugitive task force to him, according to US authorities. But for decades his file was in the unsolved “cold cases” section for US law enforcement. Blacken remembered meeting both Wright and his wife socially in the former Portuguese colony where he served as ambassador from 1986 to 1989, but said he was not alerted by US law enforcement officials to Wright’s background.
“If we had received such a cable, we would have responded,” Blacken added.
“He was known as George Wright here, and it’s strange that (US officials) never tracked him down here.”
It was not clear what action, if any, he could have taken in a nation that at the time was very sympathetic to revolutionaries and perceived freedom fighters.
Bracken could not recall what sort of work Wright did in Guinea-Bisseau, a tiny nation on the Atlantic Ocean. He remembered Wright’s Portuguese wife, Maria do Rosario Valente, better because she had worked as a freelance Portuguese-English translator – and could even have worked on projects for the embassy itself, he added. Wright and his wife were already married when Blacken knew them but he did not know how they met.
Wright has lived for at least the last two decades in Portugal, and a photocopy of his Portuguese residency card viewed by the AP listed his home country as Guinea-Bissau. A woman who answered the phone at the Guinea-Bissau embassy in Lisbon said no one was available to comment on whether Wright obtained citizenship from the African nation. Wright’s arrest has generated intense media interest in Portugal.
Wright was convicted of the 1962 murder of gas station owner Walter Patterson, a decorated World War II veteran shot during a robbery at his business in Wall, New Jersey. While on the run, the FBI said Wright
joined an underground militant group, the Black Liberation Army, and lived with some members in Detroit.
In 1972, Wright – dressed as a priest and using an alias – is accused of hijacking a Delta flight from Detroit to Miami along with other Black Liberation Army members. The hijackers identified themselves to passengers as a Black Panther group, police said. After releasing the plane’s 86 other passengers in exchange for a US$1 million ransom, the hijackers forced the plane to fly to Boston, then onto Algeria, where the hijackers sought asylum. – AP/ www.cbsnews.com/sacbee.com
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