BY TIM JOHNSON

  WASHINGTON - The Bush administration has returned a 32-foot Cuban patrol boat used by four members of the Cuban border guard Friday to flee to Key
  West, U.S. officials said Monday.

  The Coast Guard handed off the patrol boat to Cuban officials Sunday afternoon on the high seas, Coast Guard spokesman Dan Dewell said.

  SUDDEN DECISION

  The four Cuban asylum-seekers, who said they made a spur-of-the-moment decision to speed to the Keys, were wandering along a Key West street at 4
  a.m. Friday when they encountered a police officer. They had docked their patrol boat at the Hyatt Marina Resort hotel, its Cuban flag still flying.

  Immigration and Naturalization Service officials are interviewing the Cuban border guards, examining their request to remain in the United States, officials
  said. They were still in the custody of the U.S. Border Patrol late Monday.

  Mindful of past incidents in which U.S. ships and aircraft have fallen into unfriendly hands, the Bush administration agreed to turn over the vessel quickly to
  the Cuban government, said a State Department official, who asked to remain anonymous.

  The official described the speedboat as ``a sovereign warship of the border guard, an armed service of the Cuban government.''

  While the description of the vessel as a ''warship'' may seem overblown, U.S. officials said they hewed closely to international norms that protect U.S.
  vessels in similar situations.

  They noted the April 2001 incident in which a U.S. EP-3 spy plane collided with a Chinese jet. The U.S. plane made an emergency landing on Hainan island,
  and the 24 crew members were held 11 days. China ordered the dismantling of the U.S. aircraft before its removal.

  In another major incident, North Korea seized a Navy intelligence ship, the USS Pueblo, in 1968, eventually releasing the 82 crewmen but retaining the ship
  to this day.

  REASON FOR ACTION

  ''These were things we were thinking about'' in returning the Cuban vessel quickly, the U.S. official said.

  In the last such incident involving Cuba, eight defectors flew a state-owned crop-duster to Key West in November. The Cuban government demanded the
  plane's return, but a judge ordered the aircraft sold to help pay a $27 million settlement that Cuba owes the former wife of a Cuban spy.