"What the Americans have done is unconscionable, which is a very large word which says really horrible," Einhorn said in an interview on Dateline NBC.

Arrested for a second time in September, Einhorn is free pending an extradition hearing Dec. 1. In December 1997, a French court refused to return him to the United States to serve a life sentence after he was convicted in absentia for the 1977 murder of Helen "Holly" Maddux.

"This is not a Third World country; they know that the United States is trying to get away with something, and they are saying no in a very quiet, very soft, very beautiful, very gentle way, which warms my heart," Einhorn said.

He has maintained he was framed for the slaying of Maddux, a Tyler, Tex., woman who became his live-in girlfriend when he was a Philadelphia counterculture leader and prominent anti-war campaigner in the 1960s. Police found her corpse stuffed in a trunk in his closet.

He blamed her death on a conspiracy whose participants he would not name.

"It is very complicated, and it is going to take a large book to explain," he said.

Disputing Einhorn's version was Maddux's sister, Elisabeth "Buffy" Hall, of the Fort Worth, Tex., area, also interviewed in the television recap of the lurid slaying.

"I don't know if he really believes his own baloney or if he is just shucking and jiving for the camera," she said.