An American escapee's wife: I didn't familiar about his earlier life
Published by Julia Volkovah under airplane hijacking, FBI, George Wright, Portugal on 7:22 AM
The wife of detained US escapee George Wright said her husband told her he ran away from a U.S. jail but never unveiled he had been prisoner of murder or alleged of a staged airplane hijacking.
Maria do Rosario Valente said she was astonished to find out about her husband's history after his detention in Portugal last week after 41 years on the lam. She said she considered the jail flee "was just a show off."
"Now I've found out the rest," she told Portugal's TVI television in an interview televised late Sunday.
The U.S. is endeavoring to send back Wright to serve the rest of his 15- to 30-year punishment for a 1962 killing in New Jersey. The FBI also says he was part of a Black Liberation Army group that seized a U.S. plane to Algeria in 1972.
Wright's lawyer says the American will assert a new distinctiveness to stop the U.S. from extraditing him. The lawyer, Manuel Luis Ferreira, told The AP that Wright turn into a Portuguese nationality called Jose Luis Jorge dos Santos in 1991 after wedding Valente.
Wright's current distinctiveness was given to him by Guinea-Bissau's government when it decided him political refuge in the 1980s, and that was acknowledged by Portugal, Ferreira said. At the time, Guinea-Bissau was a single-party Marxist state that seemed kindly on black liberation lobby groups.
That reality may weigh a great deal on the U.S. banishment request for Wright. Portuguese inhabitants crooked in another country may be able to serve their punishments in Portugal if family members are there.
Valente told TVI late Sunday she not at all really considered Wright's jail flee story —pending now.
"I didn't in fact think much of it," she told TVI. "I considered it was only a show off."
Wright broke out of the Bayside State Prison in Leesburg, New Jersey, on Aug. 19, 1970, after allocating at least seven years of his punishment for murdering a man in a 1962 gas station burglary. He was held in a seaside village near Lisbon last week after ten years on the escape, and is being captured in Lisbon while the court rules on his exile.
Valente, who is Portuguese, met Wright in the late 1970s when he was residing near Lisbon, the Portuguese capital. They lived mutually in the 1980s in Portugal and in Guinea-Bissau, an ex Portuguese colony in West Africa, according to Wright's lawyer.
Valente gave birth to a son, Marco, with Wright in 1986 and wedded Wright in 1990. They had a daughter, Sara, the following year.
Valente said she was traveling her parents last week when she was identified into police headquarters in Lisbon and given an account of the allegations against her husband.
"That day is unclear," she said.
She said their children, now grown up, "were sorrow -stricken" when they found out about their father's history and wept with him all the way during their first lockup trip last week.
She explained Wright as a trustworthy husband and fanatical father.
"I've no reason for objection," she said.
