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George Wright wants to finish sentence for murder in Portugal
Recent photo of George Wright
“This taints the U.S.’s image that someone could be gone and not found as long as he was,” McNabb said.
Hijacking in the United States carries a possible penalty of life in prison, and Portugal does not allow people to be extradited if they will face more than the nation’s maximum sentence of 25 years.
Under Portuguese law, citizens can serve sentences handed down in a foreign country in Portugal. But Portuguese officials say there is doubt about the validity of Wright’s identification documents and whether he is a citizen like his wife and children.
A foreigner marrying a Portuguese is entitled to Portuguese nationality, but has to formally request it and it is not known whether Wright did. In addition, his Portuguese residency card was under an alias, Jose Luis Jorge dos Santos, and listed his home country as Guinea-Bissau.
Ferreira said his client had been living openly in Portugal and even had a Facebook page.
“He wasn’t running. He wasn’t hiding,” Ferreira told TVI.
The United States, meanwhile, confirmed that Wright’s Portuguese wife had worked as an occasional freelance translator for the U.S. Embassy in the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau from 1984 to 1990. Wright himself did not work for the embassy, U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Friday.
In the 1980s, Wright lived openly under his real name with his wife in Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony, and even socialized with U.S. embassy officials there. A former U.S. ambassador told The Associated Press he knew Wright then but had no idea he was a fugitive.
Andre Cameron, an American friend of Wright’s for the past 20 years in Portugal, told the AP he was stunned by this week’s revelations about Wright’s hidden past.
He described Wright as a regular church-goer and said Wright’s sister, who lives in North Carolina, visited her brother about three times in Portugal, most recently several years ago. He declined to give the woman’s name or her location to spare her from media attention.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.
