Slain Puerto Rican Rebel Didn't Have to Die

A former naval intelligence officer says he knows for a fact that Puerto Rican nationalist fugitive Filiberto Ojeda Rios didn't have to die in a shootout with the FBI.

He says he knows this because he told FBI agents a year ago where they could find Ojeda - even telling them where he liked to eat.

"What they did was an injustice," the former Navy officer told me last week. "No matter what Ojeda did, he was still a human being. ... They could easily have taken him alive."

The informant, who asked not to be identified, has given his account to the Justice Department's Inspector General's Office, which opened an independent review of the shooting last week.

FBI Director Robert Mueller requested the review after top officials from the island's various political parties, including pro-commonwealth Gov. Anibal Acevedo Vilá, and several members of New York's congressional delegation publicly criticized the FBI's handling of the incident.

And yesterday the Puerto Rican commonwealth's own Department of Justice subpoenaed weapons and records of the FBI's operation.

By the time of his death, the 72-year-old Ojeda, a onetime musician turned revolutionary, had become a legendary figure on the island.