The federal government detained Cancun’s police chief on Monday and brought him to the capital to ask him about the torture and killing of a retired army brigadier general near the resort city, Cancun’s mayor said.
It was unclear if police chief Francisco Velasco was considered a suspect in the triple murder of decorated army Brigadier General Mauro Enrique Tello, an active-duty lieutenant and a civilian who were found dead on Feb. 3 outside Cancun. Mayor Gregorio Sanchez did not give further details on Velasco’s detention.
A spokesman for the federal Attorney General’s office in Mexico City said Velasco was being detained for questioning, and prosecutors would decide within the next few days whether he would be considered a suspect. The official was not authorized to give his name.
The action came hours after soldiers stripped Velasco and his force of their weapons for about three hours to check the registration of the guns.
With Velasco’s detention, state police were temporarily put in charge of officers patrolling Mexico’s top tourist destination.
No one has been arrested in connection with the killings, but investigators believe they are part of escalating drug-related violence.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon told Excelsior newspaper in an interview published on Monday that more than 6,000 people were killed in organized-crime-related homicides last year.
It was the first government confirmation of the total number of killings last year amid a huge government crackdown on cartels.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
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