Mexico police guard smuggling suspect
By JORGE DOMINGUEZ Associated Press Writer
Article Launched: 06/20/2008 02:46:32 PM MDT


CANCUN, Mexico—Hundreds of police and military sharpshooters guarded an immigration detention center Friday in southern Mexico amid threats that gunmen would try to rescue a Cuban-American man being held there on smuggling charges, state officials said.
Gumersindo Jimenez, a Quintana Roo state officer, said immigration officials received several anonymous phone calls from someone saying that assailants planned to free Hanoy Cardentey from an immigration detention center in Chetumal, the state capital.

Cardentey, who has a residence in Miami, was detained Wednesday after authorities found his boat drifting off Quintana Roo's Caribbean coast. He was detained and accused of trafficking Cubans to the United States via Mexico, Jimenez said.

Authorities declined to say whether Cardentey is linked to an attack last week in which masked gunmen forced immigration agents off a bus and then fled with 33 Cubans and four Central Americans on board.

The vehicle was later found abandoned in Chiapas state, and this week 18 of the Cubans walked across an international bridge in Hidalgo County, Texas, and handed themselves over to U.S. authorities, according to Mexico's Attorney General's office.

Officials are investigating who kidnapped the immigrants and who helped them reach Texas.
Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, Mexico's deputy federal attorney general, told Televisa network late Thursday that investigators are looking into whether members of
the Zetas—a gang of hit men linked to drug cartels—were involved.
Vasconcelos said the gang could be making inroads into the lucrative business of human trafficking. He did not elaborate.

Cuba's ambassador to Mexico, Manuel Aguilera, blamed a Miami-based mafia for the attack.

In recent years, several Cuban-Americans believed to be people smugglers have turned up dead in the Yucatan Peninsula, which lies just 120 miles (190 kilometers) southwest of Cuba. Mexican authorities say Cuban-American human trafficking rings operate in and around the Yucatan resort city of Cancun.

Questioned in Texas, the Cuban migrants told authorities they were taken to a safe house in the Gulf coast port of Veracruz, put on a bus with fake Mexican immigration documents and sent to the U.S. border.

Nine Mexican immigration officials and the two bus drivers have been detained and are being investigated for their possible involvement, the Attorney General's office said. Authorities are searching for the 19 migrants still missing, said Raul Vazquez, an official with Mexico's Migration Institute in Chiapas.

On Friday, Mexican Interior Secretary Juan Camilo Mourino said officials are looking at "the structure of the trafficking network and the level of penetration with immigration authorities."

He said there would be no tolerance for immigration officials involved in human trafficking and promised unspecified new controls.

The migrants said they left Cuba on a makeshift boat and were picked up at sea by two men in a yacht who offered to take them to the United States. The yacht was then intercepted off Cancun by the Mexican navy, and the two men, Nairobi Claro Ortega and Noriel Veloz, were detained on suspicion of human trafficking.






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