U.S. extraditing murder suspect

MIAMI, United States -- A Spaniard is to be extradited to France to face charges of raping and murdering a British schoolgirl five years ago, Reuters has reported.

The news agency reported that federal judge Stephen Brown in Miami said he would sign a formal order on Monday at the earliest authorising the extradition of Francisco Arce Montes to France.

Federal prosecutors said Arce, from Gijon in northern Spain, would not be sent to France until after his July 2 trial on unrelated sex charges in Florida.

Arce's lawyers also said that they would probably launch an appeal which could delay the process for as long as a year.

Arce was jailed in Miami in March on suspicion of breaking into a woman's room at a hostel and committing a lewd act -- charges to which he has pleaded not guilty.

In April a French court issued an international arrest warrant for Arce accusing him of raping and suffocating 13-year-old Caroline Dickinson at a youth hostel in Brittany while she was on a school trip in July 1996.

French authorities said DNA from semen on Dickinson's clothing and body matched DNA from a saliva sample given by Arce in Miami.

Defence attorneys said that the French government only submitted the test conclusions and not the raw data that would allow a genetic expert for the defence to verify the match.

"The results simply are not verifiable," Arce's lawyer, Assistant Public Defender Timothy Cone, said. "There wasn't enough evidence to say if they matched."

But the judge said that the extradition process only required the French to show there was enough evidence to try Arce and that any evidentiary "battle of the experts" should be left to the trial.

"I'm finding that there is probable cause to extradite Mr. Arce Montes," the judge said.

French police had conducted genetic tests on 3,500 men in France and Britain since 1996 to try to track down Dickinson's killer.

The trail led to Arce after a U.S. immigration official read about the case in a British newspaper.