The release of Yair Klein is likely to stir passions and inflame relations between Israel and Columbia, which has sought to extradite the former military officer since he was sentenced in absentia for helping train far-right paramilitary groups in the 1980s.
The groups were responsible for mass murder and widespread land theft during more than a decade-long reign of terror across Colombia’s countryside. Colombian courts issued the sentence in 2001. Klein was arrested by Russian authorities in August 2007 as he touched down at a Moscow airport.
Klein appeared tired and defiant as he left the airport terminal in Israel early Saturday. He wore a khaki-colored sweater and beige pants and carried his own luggage.
Friends and family swarmed around him, at one point handing Klein a large bottle of liquor as a gift.
He told Israeli media that he missed women most of all during his stint behind bars. Before he left Moscow, Klein said he would write books that would “cause chaos in Israel,” speaking during an interview with Israel’s Channel 2 TV.
Moscow released Klein after the European Court of Human Rights recommended in April that he not be extradited because of concerns he wouldn’t receive a fair trial in Colombia.
Klein was convicted of training members of the private army of the late drug lord Pablo Escobar, whose hit men killed justice ministers, journalists, judges, prosecutors — and the cartel-fighting presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan in 1989.
Klein has denied working with Colombia’s cocaine cartels and said he only instructed paramilitaries in defense tactics.
Colombia’s Justice Minister German Vargas said his country would not “stand by with arms crossed.” Officials there argued that Klein’s return to Israel was denying justice to victims of the paramilitaries.
He said in a statement that Colombian diplomats were studying legal alternatives for getting Klein to Colombia and hoped Israel, Russia and the rest of the international community would respond affirmatively.
Klein’s lawyer, Mordehai Tzibin, said his client “would be tortured and then murdered without a doubt” if extradited to Colombia.
