Felon commits horrifying murder

Puerto Rico (AP):

The crime was horrifying enough, a nightclub owner, hacked to death with a machete, was found buried in pieces. But what really outraged people was that the accused killer had been deported from the United States (US) to his native Grenada as a convicted felon.

As a foreign-bred criminal, the suspect never should have returned to the close-knit tropical nation, relatives of the victim and others said. Islanders called for more vigilance over deportees by the government, which says it needs help from Washington to handle the return of hardened convicts.

The US has deported thousands of convicted criminals to the Caribbean annually since 1996, when Congress mandated that every non-citizen sentenced to a year or more in prison be kicked out of the country upon release. In all, the US is responsible for about three-quarters of the region's returning criminal deportees, with the United Kingdom and Canada accounting for most of the other ex-cons arriving in the islands.

In the Caribbean, governments say deportees are exacerbating crime in nations with high levels of violence such as Jamaica. On the smaller islands such as Grenada, once considered idyllic havens from gang violence, officials say the returning deportees are partly to blame for increasingly bold and sophisticated crimes and homicide rates soaring to record levels.