By the time the United States was extracting a group of Americans and legal U.S. residents from a prison in Venezuela last month, some State Department officials had come to an uncomfortable realization.
One of the prisoners had been convicted of murdering three people in Spain in 2016. And soon he would be on his way home, having his photo taken alongside those deemed by the United States to have been wrongfully imprisoned in Venezuela.
How were they going to explain that to the American people?
On July 18, the day of the prisoner release, U.S. officials tried to figure out whether and how to acknowledge that Washington was bringing home Dahud Hanid Ortiz, whose case seemed to undercut President Trump’s claims of keeping the worst of the worst out of the United States.
In an internal email exchange that was obtained by The New York Times, State Department officials debated whether to include Mr. Hanid Ortiz in a public statement to be published that afternoon about the people being released, 10 including him.
“We had understood that we don’t want to refer to him as a hostage or wrongfully detained, which is why we said nine,” a press official wrote.
Michael Kozak, the career official who oversees diplomacy in the Western Hemisphere, replied: “Well then we probably should not have asked for him. Can we now extradite him to Spain? We did get the S.O.B. released.”
Finally, Mr. Kozak made the decision to include him: “Well I would stick with 10 as we did ask for and receive 10.” He added that the fact that at least one “is a bum does not change that fact.”
That afternoon, Secretary of State Marco Rubio released a statement saying that Mr. Trump’s leadership had led to the release of the “10 Americans.”
“Every wrongfully detained American in Venezuela is now free and back in our homeland,” Mr. Rubio said in the statement.
At some point, however, U.S. officials started referring to “nine” people instead of 10.
In a statement, an official from the State Department said: “We do not comment on allegedly ‘leaked’ emails. We are very pleased that nine innocent, wrongfully detained Americans have been freed from Venezuela. The Trump administration is committed to law and order; violators will be held accountable for their crimes.”
Mr. Rubio was not included in the email conversation about how to identify Mr. Hanid Ortiz.
The State Department has not responded to questions about why the administration decided to include Mr. Hanid Ortiz among those freed from Venezuelan detention, whether it was an oversight or purposeful, and when exactly they learned about his record.
Mr. Hanid Ortiz, 54, a citizen of the United States and Venezuela, is now living as a free man in the United States, according to two people with knowledge of the case.
A 19-year U.S. Army veteran who served for a year in Iraq, Mr. Hanid Ortiz was expelled from the military after pleading guilty to fraud and larceny.
In 2016, according to Venezuelan court documents, he sought to kill a lawyer in Madrid who he believed had a relationship with his wife. When he arrived at the lawyer’s office he killed two women there, as well as a man he mistakenly believed was the lawyer.
The deaths were violent, according to an extradition request by the Spanish government that was included in the Venezuelan records. One woman was killed with a large knife or machete. Another was likely killed with an iron bar. Afterward, Mr. Hanid Ortiz fled to Germany and eventually to Venezuela.
The Venezuelan Constitution does not allow the extradition of its citizens, so he was tried in Venezuela, found guilty and sentenced to three decades in prison in 2023.
Now that Mr. Hanid Ortiz is in the United States, Manuel Ollé Sesé, a professor of International Criminal Law at the Complutense University of Madrid, said that he believed Spain had the legal ability to extradite him.
“The murderer is convicted in Venezuela, but has not served his sentence,” he said, “so Spain could prosecute him since it would be an exception to the principle of ‘ne bis in idem,’ that is, double jeopardy.”
A person at the Spanish attorney general’s office who was not authorized to speak publicly said that the office’s criminal cooperation unit was studying the case.
Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times.
Julie Turkewitz is the Andes Bureau Chief for The Times, based in Bogotá, Colombia, covering Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru.
The post ‘Can We Extradite Him?’ How U.S. Officials Grappled With the Release of a Triple Murderer appeared first on New York Times.
