The FBI has made the fugitive member of a black militant group convicted of murdering a U.S. state trooper the first woman on its list of most wanted terrorists.
The reward for the capture and return of Joanne Chesimard, now living in Cuba as Assata Shakur, was doubled to $2 million on Thursday, the 40th anniversary of the bloody gun battle.
“She continues to flaunt her freedom in the face of this horrific crime,” New Jersey State Police Superintendent Col. Rick Fuentes said at a news conference.
The U.S. Justice Department has offered a $1 million reward for information leading to her capture. The additional money is being put up by the state of New Jersey.
Chesimard, a member of the Black Liberation Army, was convicted in 1977 of the 1973 murder of Werner Foerster during a traffic stop. The BLA was responsible for killing more than a dozen police officers in the 1970s and ’80s, said agent Aaron Ford of the FBI’s Newark division.
According to Fuentes, Foerster and his partner stopped a car carrying Chesimard and two others for a broken tail light. When the troopers approached the car, a gunfight ensued and both troopers were injured. Chesimard then took Foerster’s gun and shot him twice in the head as he lay on the ground.
Chesimard escaped from prison in November 1979 with the help of accomplices. She spent the next few years living in safe houses before surfacing in Cuba in 1984, Fuentes said.
In Cuba, Chesimard has continued to espouse her anti-U.S. views in speeches advocating “revolution and terrorism,” and might have connections to other international terrorist organizations, Ford said.
Chesimard is believed to be one of dozens of U.S. fugitives living in Cuba, many of them one-time members of militant groups. Cuba doesn’t haven an extradition agreement with the U.S. because of the chilly relations between the two countries over the past five decades, but the climate appears to be slowly changing.
In recent years, Cuba has deported some fugitives back to the United States, including one man convicted of mail fraud and another sought on child pornography charges. This month, the country returned a Florida couple accused in a custody dispute of kidnapping their two children and sailing to Cuba.
The Cuban government had no immediate comment on Thursday’s announcement. This week, the State Department said it has no plans to remove Cuba from a list of state sponsors of terrorism. That list also includes Iran, Syria and Sudan. Cuba has denied links to terrorism.
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