The suspected kingpin of one of Mexico's oldest and most notorious drug cartels ordered the murder of Tijuana's deputy police chief and the beheadings of three police officers, a recently unsealed federal indictment showed.
Francisco Javier Arellano Felix, 37, would be eligible for the death penalty if convicted on a count of running a criminal organization, part of the new seven-count indictment unsealed on Tuesday. The killings were included as evidence of the criminal enterprise that authorities say extended into the US.
That charge was not part of a 2003 indictment that led to his arrest in August by the US Coast Guard in international waters near La Paz, Mexico.
PHOTO: AP
The new indictment says that Arellano Felix ordered the murder of Hugo Gabriel Coronel Vargas, Tijuana's deputy police chief, who died on Jan. 17 last year in a hail of more than 60 shots from an automatic rifle.
The indictment also charges that Arellano Felix and a man authorities consider his underling, Manuel Arturo Villarreal Heredia, ordered the June 20 beheadings of three police officers from Rosarito Beach, a spring break spot just south of the border from San Diego.
Arellano Felix and Villarreal were to appear in federal court yesterday on charges of running a criminal organization, racketeering and conspiracy to commit racketeering, drug trafficking and money laundering.
Meanwhile, authorities said that Mexico's countryside is teeming with a new high-yield hybrid marijuana plant that can be cultivated year-round and cannot be eradicated with cutting or pesticides.
Soldiers fanned out across some of the new fields on Tuesday, pulling up plants by the root and burning them, as helicopter gunships clattered overhead to give them cover from a raging drug war in the western state of Michoacan.
"These plants have been genetically improved," Army General Manuel Garcia told a handful of media outlets allowed to accompany soldiers on a daylong raid of some 70 marijuana fields. "Before we could cut the plant and destroy it, but this plant will come back to life unless it's taken out by the roots."
Garcia said that even if doused with herbicide, the plants' roots survive, making eradication much more difficult.
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