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| NEWS > 02 December 2005 |
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New Orleans police fire one of
One New Orleans police officer was fired on Monday, and one will be disciplined when he returns to town, police superintendent Warren Riley said.
The two were among a group of seven plainclothes officers working in the French Quarter last December who were charged with handcuffing and beating a lobbyist for the community group ACORN.
"There was a hearing Friday, one received a five-day suspension, the other a 20-day suspension," Riley said. "I overturned those."
Officer Reynolds Rigney Jr., who joined the police force in 2004, was terminated, Riley said.<... Read more
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Houston Chronicle - United Sta
02 December 2005
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11 Mexican agents charged in t
MEXICO CITY - Eleven Mexican federal agents have been charged in connection with the kidnapping and likely murder of four men whose final interrogation was captured on a homemade video, the country's top drug enforcement official said Thursday.
The 11 agents of the Federal Investigation Agency were allegedly in the employ of the so-called "Sinaloa Cartel" in May when they captured the four men, believed to be paid killers for another drug-smuggling organization, said Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, a Mexican deputy attorney general.
In the video, the four bound men detail how they and others in their organization captured, tortured and killed rivals in Nuevo Laredo, the city across the Rio Grande from Laredo that has convulsed with drug violence this year.
U.S. and Mexican officials say that although the killing of only one of the men was filmed, all four were almost certainly killed following the questioning.
The video, time-stamped May 16, was sent anonymously last month to the Kitsap Sun, a newspaper in Bremerton, Wash., which in turn sent it to the Dallas Morning News. The Texas newspaper published an account of the incident Thursday. Both the Morning News and Kitsap Sun ran excerpts from the video on their Web sites, though neither showed the fatal shooting.
Eight of the accused Mexican agents were arrested in September, Santiago Vasconcelos said, adding that the search is on for the others, as well as a handful of civilian accomplices.
Authorities believe the agents kidnapped the four men and likely were involved in their torture and slayings as well, Santiago Vasconcelos said.
The arrested agents were attached to the Acapulco office of the Federal Investigation Agency, known by its Spanish initials as AFI.
Investigating since June
Mexican authorities received a copy of the DVD in September and have been investigating the disappearance of the four men shown on it since June, Santiago Vasconcelos said. U.S. authorities have also been aware of the DVD for some time, officials from several federal agencies confirmed Thursday.
Santiago Vasconcelos said the agents appeared to coach the men, who were bruised and bloody, during the interrogation.
The video "shows the ruthlessness of these cartels," said Alonso Peņa, resident agent in charge of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency's district office in San Antonio, which oversees the Laredo area.
"It goes to what we have been saying about them all along. They are ruthless thugs," Peņa said.
Gunmen of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, reputed boss of the Sinaloa Cartel, have waged a war this year in Nuevo Laredo and elsewhere against those employed by Osiel Cardenas, the jailed head of the Gulf Cartel, based in the Mexican cities bordering South Texas.
The Gulf Cartel gunmen, known as the Zetas, include former members of the Mexican army's special forces. Gangland violence in the southern Pacific coast states of Michoacan and Guerrero also has been blamed on the Zetas' feud with the Guzman organization.
More than 150 people have been murdered this year in Nuevo Laredo alone. Most of the deaths have been linked to the rival smuggling organizations, each of which is thought to move tons of cocaine, marijuana and other narcotics into the United States.
Until now, Mexican officials have denied that federal agents were supporting one side or the other in the conflict.
But the accused agents apparently were working for Hector Beltran Leyva, said to be a top lieutenant of Guzman's, Santiago Vasconcelos said.
Following the assassination of Nuevo Laredo's newly appointed police chief in June, federal authorities dismantled the city's 720-member police force, firing hundreds of municipal officers accused of working for the Gulf Cartel.
Notes from the Zetas pinned to the bodies of two men dumped on the edge of the city later this summer warned that Beltran Leyva would never win in Nuevo Laredo, even with the help of the federal police.
Allegations called false
Despite the charges against the 11 agents, Santiago Vasconcelos said that allegations of high-level police corruption made by the men on the tape were coerced by their torturers to confuse federal agencies.
He also said that the men's allegations that a Nuevo Laredo reporter killed last spring was on a gang's payroll was false.
It remains unclear why the tape was sent to a newspaper in Washington state.
"It was definitely a message," Peņa, tilde the U.S. Immigration and Customs official, said. "To whom, I don't know. Why, I don't know. But it was taped to be shown to somebody."
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