Canada: man who allegedly shot Chicago police officer in 1969 ordered extradited to U.S.

A judge on Friday ordered a fugitive accused of shooting a Chicago police officer more than 35 years ago to be extradited to the United States.

Joseph Pannell, a former Toronto library worker who spent more than two decades living in the area under the alias Gary Freeman, allegedly shot the officer as 19-year-old member of the Black Panthers.

His family said they planned to appeal the decision.

After the ruling, Pannell's wife and four children stood in protest outside the U.S. Consulate located across the street from the downtown courthouse.

"We all have bleeding hearts right now, but this is not over," said Pannell's wife, Natercia Coelho.

"He came here because he feared for his life. What happened to him was wrong in '69, and what happened today is wrong."

The 1969 shooting of Terrence Knox, a 21-year-old patrolman who was left paralyzed, came at the height of notoriety for the Black Panthers, a revolutionary black nationalist group that rejected the integrationist vision of the more mainstream civil rights movement.

Pannell fled the country after he was freed on bail in 1973. He apparently lived in Montreal for several years before moving to Toronto and getting a job at the Toronto Reference Library, where he worked as a researcher for 13 years, eventually marrying a co-worker.

Immigration officials caught up with him in July 2004, after the FBI asked Canadian authorities to search for matches to Pannell's fingerprints. The prints matched those taken for a Canadian customs offense committed by Pannell in 1983, AP reports. P.T.