Luis Posada Carriles, freed from a Panama prison and accused by the Cuban government of being a terrorist, has sneaked into Honduras, officials there said.

BY JUAN O. TAMAYO

Fugitive Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles, accused by Havana of multiple terror attacks, sneaked into Honduras using an altered U.S. passport after he was freed from a Panama prison, Honduran officials said Saturday.

A Honduran immigration worker at the airport in the northern city of San Pedro Sula confirmed that a known photograph of Posada matched a man who landed there Thursday, the officials said.

''Based on that identification, we believe Posada did enter Honduras, and we have many teams out looking for him,'' said a top government official who asked for anonymity because of the sensitivity of his job.

Posada, 76, is a virtual icon to some exiles committed to toppling Cuban President Fidel Castro by force and is linked to a lengthy string of plots to kill Castro or bomb Cuban targets, including an airliner and Havana tourist spots. He was once branded by Castro as ``the worst terrorist in the hemisphere.''

His presence in any country almost always sparks complaints from Havana of sheltering a terrorist -- and Cuban allegations that Washington lobbied those countries to protect him.

Honduran officials said that if he is arrested, Posada will be deported immediately but acknowledged that would be difficult because he is believed to have only Cuban citizenship. ''At no time are we going to allow our country to be home nor sanctuary for terrorists of any type, whether they attempt against Cuba . . . or any other country,'' Interior Minister Oscar Alvarez said Friday.

Posada went into hiding after Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso pardoned him and three Miami Cuban exiles arrested there in 2000 in connection with an alleged plot to kill Castro during a visit. A Panamanian court dropped initial charges of conspiracy to murder and possession of explosives, but convicted them in April of endangering public safety and sentenced them to up to eight years.

3 BACK IN DADE

The three Miami men -- Gaspar Jiménez, Pedro Remón and Guillermo Novo, all longtime anti-Castro militants -- flew home Thursday aboard a Learjet chartered by Santiago Alvarez, a Miami developer and friend who helped raise some $400,000 for their legal defense.

But Posada, an explosives expert trained by the CIA in the 1960s and alleged mastermind of the Panama assassination plot -- which all four have denied -- boarded a different chartered aircraft in Panama and has not been seen in public since.

Santiago Alvarez told The Herald Saturday he would not comment on Posada's whereabouts. He has said that he fears a Cuban attempt against Posada.

Honduran government officials said he landed in San Pedro Sula aboard a U.S. registered Learjet 31A that arrived from Panama and filed a flight manifest saying it was carrying four passengers -- but left with only three.

Honduran officials provided The Herald with the jet's registration number. Federal Aviation Administration records show the jet is registered to a Miami aviation company, but efforts to contact the firm and its manager failed Saturday.

PASSPORT

The passport used by the man who stayed in Honduras is in the name of Melvin Cleyde Thompson, the Honduran officials added. They said a check with U.S. authorities showed that the passport, No. 076050572, had been legally issued to an unidentified woman.

Honduran officials also said that at the time of Posada's arrival, witnesses spotted a wealthy Cuban-American-Honduran businessman waiting outside the Ramón Villeda Morales Airport terminal in San Pedro Sula, 130 miles northwest of the capital city of Tegucigalpa.

Police investigators have been unable to locate the businessman for questioning since Thursday, the Honduran officials added.

Posada lived in hiding in El Salvador and often visited Honduras for extended stays in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, after his escape from a Venezuelan prison where he was awaiting a retrial in connection with the 1976 midair bombing of a Cuban jetliner in which 73 people were killed. The first trial found him not guilty.

He eventually turned up in El Salvador, working for the U.S.-backed supply operation for contra rebels fighting the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.