British up a blind alley in bid to extradite Maze escapee

FOR the past month, the bloody conflict between Northern Ireland's nationalist Catholics and its British opponents has been waged at an unusual arena - an American court.

The Federal court in San Francisco has been the venue of a bizarre hearing in which the British Government has sought the extradition of an escapee from Belfast's infamous Maze prison.

To date, the British have had little success in their bid to send James Joseph Smyth back to jail to complete a 20-year sentence for the attempted murder of a prison official.

The hearing, which has been watched with intense and sometimes lurid interest by the British press, has turned into a debate over whether Irish Catholics suffer persecution in Northern Ireland.

An all-star cast of witnesses from Britain and Northern Ireland have been summoned to give evidence, among them the UK's senior civil servant in Northern Ireland, John Chilcot; Brigadier Alistair Irwin, the commander of Britain's troops in the troubledregion; left-wing British MP Ken Livingstone and fiery Irish radical and former MP Bernadette Devlin McAliskey.

Smyth, who escaped from the Maze in 1983, along with 37 other inmates, belongs to Sinn Fein, but denies he is a member of the banned Irish Republican Army.