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The US includes a new Mexican drug lord in the list of the 10 most wanted fugitives

2020-10-14T01:54:53.095Z


The FBI offers a reward of one million dollars to catch José Rodolfo Villarreal Hernández, head of the Beltrán Leyva cartel and accused of murder


The United States offers a reward of up to one million dollars to capture José Rodolfo Villarreal Hernández

El Gato

.

The name of Villarreal Hernández, head of the Beltrán Leyva brothers' cartel in Monterrey, in northern Mexico, was the last to be added to the list of the 10 most wanted fugitives by the FBI on Tuesday.

The US authorities want to bring the kingpin to trial for ordering the murder in May 2013 of Osiel Cárdenas' lawyer, who was the leader and founder of that criminal organization until his capture in 2003.

Villarreal Hernández is described as a high-profile criminal who is in charge of trafficking cocaine and marijuana to the United States and who orders intimidating crimes to maintain the influence of his criminal group.

The cartel of the Beltrán Leyva brothers separated in 2008 from the Sinaloa cartel of Joaquín

El Chapo

Guzmán, and has lost spotlight to the advancement of other organizations and the arrest or murder of their original leaders, but it still has a presence in the Mexican states of Guerrero, Morelos, Nayarit and Sinaloa under various names and splits, according to the latest report from the DEA.

Criminals like Osiel Cárdenas were crucial in the late 1990s in the emergence and rise of Los Zetas, originally a group of elite ex-military men who were co-opted and recruited as hitmen until they formed their own cartel in northeastern Mexico.

Cárdenas was extradited to the United States in 2005 and sentenced in 2010 to 25 years in prison and a fine of $ 50 million.

The crime for which El Gato is wanted occurred in a parking lot in Southlake (Texas), on the outskirts of Dallas.

The lawyer and his wife were loading their purchases into the car when a pickup truck approached and a hitman fired multiple shots at the victim, who died in a hospital hours later, an FBI statement said.

"Villarreal Hernández is accused of orchestrating this brutal murder that took place in broad daylight and in a busy shopping center," declared one of the US agents.

"The shooter and his accomplices did not show compassion for the victim, his wife and the innocent bystanders who witnessed the murder," it adds.

El Gato's brother, José Ramón Villarreal Hernández

El Mon

, was extradited last March to the United States, in investigations related to the same crime.

The Mon attempted to evade extradition with an injunction that was rejected in February and handed over to US agents at the Mexico City International Airport.

US authorities believe that El Gato may be hiding in the Mexican capital and in Monterrey.

Three other people involved were arrested in 2014 and sentenced two years later.

The testimonies given during the trial in a Texas court put the Villarreal Hernández brothers as the intellectual authors of the murder and those in charge of paying the hitmen.

It was also revealed that the motive for the crime was that the murdered lawyer had been commissioned by Cárdenas to deliver $ 50 million, in property and cash, as part of a collaboration agreement with the US authorities to reduce his sentence.

The charges against El Gato are conspiracy to commit murder for hire and stalking his victim in various US states.

Also on the list of the 10 most wanted are Mexican drug trafficker Rafael Caro Quintero and two Mexican-American fugitives, Alejandro Rosales Castillo and Arnoldo Jiménez.

Caro Quintero, one of Sinaloa's most famous drug traffickers, had been sentenced in Mexico to almost 199 years in prison in 1989 for the murder of Enrique

Kiki

Camarena, a DEA agent, and other crimes, but in 2013 he won an injunction and was set free.

The United States offers 20 million for his capture.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2020-10-14

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