An international legal tussle is developing over the fate of Manuel Noriega, the deposed dictator of Panama, as he prepares for his release from a Florida prison.

Authorities in France, backed by the US Justice Department, are demanding that the inmate, known as “Pineapple Face” because of his pockmarked features, be extradited to Paris, where allegedly he purchased three flats using illegal drug money.

However, the Government in Panama wants him returned to his home country to face punishment for the torture and murder in 1985 of a dissident leader whose severed head was discovered in a mailbag.

Noriega, meanwhile, is also fighting to go home, hopeful that sympathetic elements in the Panamanian leadership will allow him to live out his old age with his family as a free man.

Frank Rubino, his lawyer, will go to federal court in Miami on Monday in an attempt to block the French extradition, arguing that a US judge’s classification of him as a “prisoner of war” in 1992 entitles him to repatriation under the terms of the Geneva Convention. “The US does not have . . . the authority to send General Noriega anywhere but back to Panama,” he argued.

Noriega, a military officer, promoted himself to the role of leader of Panama in 1984 and is credited by the US Senate as the founder of the Western world’s first “narco-kleptocracy” — a government based on drug profits. He was an ally initially of the US, which turned a blind eye to his Mafia-style regime and lucrative partnership with the Medellín drugs cartel, in Colombia, in return for favours that included him helping to channel arms to pro-American forces in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

Relations deteriorated and in 1989 America turned on him. As US troops stormed the country, Noriega fled to the Vatican Embassy in Panama City.In an attempt to force him out, US troops set up giant speakers in the street outside and blasted the building round the clock with heavy-rock music. The music was switched off after a complaint from the Pope and Noriega surrendered. He was flown to Miami, where he was sentenced to 40 years’ imprisonment — later reduced to 30 years — for drug trafficking, money laundering and racketeering.

Now aged 71 and judged to have earned time off for good behaviour, he is due to be released on September 9 from the Federal Correctional Institution in Miami, where he has spent the past 17 years in an apartment-style cell nicknamed “the presidential suite”. His accommodation includes two rooms, a television, a telephone and an exercise bike, Noriega having successfully argued that as a “prisoner of war” he deserves special privileges.

That PoW status is at the centre of his insistence that he cannot be sent to France. Mr Rubino claims that the French extradition move has been set up to spare Martin Torrijos, the President of Panama, the embarrassment of taking back Noriega. “For 15 years Panama has been screaming that it wants the general back there for murder, and now they step back and let France get in line so he can be tried there for buying an apartment? — what a bunch of hot air,” Mr Rubino told The Times yesterday.

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