Mexican Media: Alleged Leader In Consulate Killings Captured

Federal police have captured the alleged leader of a ruthless gang of killers who work for a drug cartel in the violent border of Ciudad Juarez, Mexican news media said Saturday.

The suspect, Jose Antonio Acosta Hernandez, is wanted by the U.S. government on charges of murdering a U.S. consulate employee and her husband last year in Ciudad Juarez, which is across the border from El Paso, Texas.

The newspaper El Universal and Milenio television said the 33-year-old Acosta was arrested Friday in the northern city of Chihuahua, capital of the state where Ciudad Juarez is.

Mexican authorities have identified Acosta as the head of La Linea, a gang of hit men and corrupt police officers who act as enforcers for the Juarez Cartel.

Federal officials said they could not confirm the arrest, but federal police spokesman Juan Carlos Buenrostro said a suspect would be flown from northern Mexico to Mexico City to be shown before news media by Sunday.

The federal Attorney General’s Office offered a 15 million peso ($1.2 million) reward last October for information leading to Acosta’s arrest.

A woman answering the reward phone line advertised on Acosta’s wanted posters said he had been detained Friday but refused to give her name.

Acosta is wanted by the U.S. government on charges of murdering a consulate employee and her husband in March of 2010.

El Pasoans Lesley Enriquez and Arthur Redelfs, an El Paso County detention officer, were gunned down in Jurez as they left a birthday party.

Investigators said the couple’s 7-month-old daughter was in the backseat of the SUV at the time, but was unharmed.

Acosta is also accused of killing the husband of another consulate employee.

The slayings are among the highest profile attacks in the city that has been plagued with violence.

A U.S. federal indictment accuses 10 people, including Acosta, of conspiring to kill the three.

Acosta and seven others are now in Mexican custody. Two others, including one of the FBI’s 10 most wanted fugitives, Eduardo Ravelo, are still at large.

Besides the consulate killings, Acosta is blamed for two other notorious crimes in the Mexican government’s 4-year-old offensive against drug cartels.

Chihuahua state officials allege Acosta ordered the massacre of 15 people, mostly teenagers, in January 2010 and was involved in a July 2010 car bombing, the first used by a cartel in recent history.

Both attacks occurred in Ciudad Juarez, a city of 1.3 million people that recorded 3,097 homicides in 2010 and more than 1,300 so far this year.

Mexico’s government says at least 35,000 people have died in drug-related violence across the country since late 2006, when President Felipe Calderon took office and launched a crackdown on organized crime. Other sources, including local media, put the number closer to 40,000.

The federal government has not released an update of its numbers since December.