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AS CubaSi went to press the Cuban police were holding a former Salvadorean soldier confessed to carrying out the bomb attacks on the island which killed an Italian businessman.
The man, Raul Ernesto Cruz Leon, confessed to have been working for an Cuban exile group in Miami. Cruz Leon entered the island as a tourist on August 31, travelling from Guatemala and had planted four bombs which exploded at the Copacabana, Chateau and Triton hotels and at the Bodeguita del Medio restaurant in Havana.
A 32-year-old Italian businessman living in Canada, Fabio di Celmo, was killed in one of the hotel blasts.
Cuban TV described Cruz Leon as a "mercenary agent recruited abroad" and said his only motive in carrying out the bomb attacks had been financial.
Cruz Leon also confessed to being responsible for two earlier similar bomb attacks at the Capri and Nacional hotels in Havana on July 12, the statement said.
Three people were hurt in those blasts, which were part of a series of bomb attacks in July and August on targets in Cuba's tourism industry, the island's biggest hard currency earner.
A foreign ministry spokesman said the investigation into the bombings revealed "the preparation and execution of an operation organised down to the last detail from the city of Miami in the United States by a subversive structure subordinated to the so-called Cuban American National Foundation."
The Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), led by Jorge Mas Canosa, is a right-wing Cuban exile group in Miami which is fiercely opposed to Fidel Castro.
The CANF had not claimed responsibility for any of the recent bomb attacks but its representatives had said in public that the group supported actions in Cuba that would end Castro's rule there.
The Cuban Interior Ministry statement said Cuba had in recent years repeatedly advised the U.S. authorities of plans by the CANF and other exile groups like Alpha 66 to carry out "terrorist" attacks in Cuba. It criticised the U.S. government for not acting against these groups.
The spokesman said CANF had recruited and financed foreign nationals to carry out the most recent bombing campaign.
It said Cruz Leon was paid $4,500 for each bomb planted and had been trained for the bombing mission in El Salvador.
He had used C-4 explosives, traces of which were found on his hands and fingernails and in the rucksack he was carrying when he was detained.
He was arrested after being recognised by witnesses from the clothes he was wearing. A woman who worked as an attendant in a hotel washroom alerted the police when she saw a suspicious man spend an inordinate amount of time in one of the cublicles.
According to a source close to the investigation who talked exclusively to CubaSi, the man was caught red-handed. He has apparently been programming the computerised timer of another bomb in the toilet cubicle.
Later two children who had seen a man plant the bomb at the Triton Hotel and a waiter from the Bodeguita del Medio restaurant confirmed the identification.
He was found to be carrying a list of tourist installations in Cuba, tools and electrical components, and instructions on how to install an explosive device.
The detained man had told investigators he was a former paratrooper in the Salvadorean army, where he had at one time received training in explosives from U.S. instructors and had also taken a sniper's training course in a U.S. military school in Georgia.
Cuba's announcement that it had made an arrest over the bombings followed repeated requests from the U.S. government for evidence to back earlier Cuban charges that the persons responsible and materials used ``came from the United States.''
The Cuban statement did not directly link Cruz Leon to other bomb attacks against Cuban tourist installations in August. These had targetted at least two hotels run by a Spanish hotel chain, the Sol Melia group, and a Cuban tourist office in Nassau, Bahamas.
Cuba's Interior Ministry was continuing its investigations and could not reveal other details at the moment, the statement said. It did not say whether other suspects were being held but rejected speculation that internal opponents of the government inside Cuba may have had a role in the blasts.
Under Cuba's penal code, the carrying out of acts of "terrorism" carries a possible death penalty.