Mexico City has suspended its anti-kidnapping chief over a rescue attempt fraught with catastrophic errors in which police killed two of their own FBI-trained commanders and a captor shot the kidnapped woman.
The case is the latest humiliation for Mexican police confronting one of the world’s highest kidnapping rates and a boom in drug gang violence.
The anti-kidnapping chief, Juan Maya Aviles, has been suspended pending an investigation into the bungled rescue attempt nearly two months ago, Mexico City Attorney General Miguel Angel Mancera said on Thursday.
He said two other officers had been detained for questioning over allegations they ignored a tip from the victim’s driver that she would be kidnapped.
The driver is suspected of initially participating in the plot to kidnap 50-year-old Yolanda Ceballos only to later back out.
The police “were experienced but the operation ultimately failed, with tragic consequences,” Mancera told Mexican broadcaster Televisa. “Of course, the intention, as in all of these operations, is to liberate the victim.”
A rapid-response police team arrived at a house in the middle of the night on July 3 hoping to free Ceballos.
The kidnappers opened fire with AK-47 assault rifles. When police fired back, two commanders — including the chief of the city’s elite rapid response force — were shot from behind by their own officers.
Meanwhile, one of the kidnappers inside the home fatally shot Ceballos before killing himself. Seven other kidnappers were captured.
The fiasco called into question intense efforts to root out corruption and better equip and train security forces that are confronting ruthless drug cartels in a battle that has killed more than 11,000 people since Mexican President Felipe Calderon took office in 2006.
A stream of families have come forward in recent years to complain of police indifference — and even complicity — in the abduction of their loved ones. Despite repeated government promises to crack down, high-profile kidnappings have surged.
The possibility that officers ignored warnings from the driver renewed suspicions of Mexican police involvement in kidnappings.
“If it is confirmed that the police knew she would be kidnapped, it would be proof of what we have been saying: that police are behind kidnappings here,” said Isabel Miranda de Wallace, who has been an outspoken anti-crime activist since the 2005 kidnapping of her 36-year-old son.
Wallace embarrassed police who neglected her son’s case when she found the kidnappers on her own. But her son remains missing.
Hundreds of police officers have been arrested or fired in anti-corruption stings under Calderon.
Last year, police in the capital arrested a former city police officer and an active federal agent in the kidnapping and killing of the 14-year-old son of a sporting goods magnate, a case that inspired huge marches against crime across the country.
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