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US 'vampire' jailed over Bolivian blasts

US citizen Triston Jay Amero displays a copy of the Koran during his trial in La Paz, Bolivia, on Oct. 24 last year. Amero was sentenced on Tuesday to 30 years in prison without parole for killing two people in hotel bombings in Bolivia's capital in 2006. PHOTO: AP

A California eccentric who named himself after a literary vampire was sentenced to 30 years in jail without parole for bombing two La Paz hotels in 2006, attacks that killed two and put a bizarre kink in already delicate Bolivia-US relations.

Triston Jay Amero, 26, who answers to Lestat Claudius de Orleans y Montevideo, a variation on a character in Anne Rice's vampire novels, was convicted on Tuesday of bombing two low-rent hotels in the La Paz, an attorney close to the case confirmed on Wednesday.

The court based its verdict largely on testimony from the Placerville native's estranged common law wife, 47-year-old Alda Ribeiro Costa, of Uruguay. Riberio was also sentenced to 30 years for her role in the crime.

Amero, who has called for the murder of supporters of Bolivian President Evo Morales, maintains his innocence and says the pair were eating pizza across town when the bombs went off.

But he's not shy about a knack for blowing things up, a skill he says he discovered lighting fireworks with his grandmother.

"There's no school where you can go to learn how to be an explosives expert," Amero told reporters during the trial. "You either have a talent for it or you don't."

Morales, meanwhile, has repeatedly insinuated that Amero is part of a larger US plot to destabilize his leftist government.

"The US government fights terrorism, and they send us terrorists," Morales said after Amero's arrest.

He later backed off any specific accusations, but still cites the hotel bombings in his frequent criticisms of US involvement in Bolivia.

US officials deny any ties to Amero, and say such comments have hurt relations with Bolivia.

An attorney monitoring the case on behalf of Amero's family said Morales tainted the trial.

"You have the president of the country saying this guy is guilty. That's not fair," said Paul Wolf, a Washington-based lawyer.

Amero's mother, Dawna Scheda, declined on Wednesday to comment on the verdict.

US court documents show Amero has received psychiatric treatment since age seven, spent years at a juvenile detention center and often made threats of suicide and violence against authorities.

A similar pattern continued in Bolivia, said a former prison official who supervised Amero's pretrial solitary confinement at Chonchocoro prison. Amero will return to serve his sentence at the grim maximum-security facility on the wind-swept outskirts of La Paz.

In travels through South America, Amero described himself as a Saudi Arabian lawyer, a pagan high priest, a public notary and even a vampire. At one point, he was jailed for bombing an automatic cash machine in northern Argentina.

He moved to Bolivia in 2004 and settled in the mining town of Potosi, where dynamite is freely sold.

He obtained the license required to sell the explosives and opened a shop -- even printing a promotional poster of his wife posing nude with a box of dynamite.
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