Mexico police guard smuggling suspect

Mexico police guard smuggling suspect
By JORGE DOMINGUEZ – 6/20/08


Unidentified Cuban citizens are escorted by Mexican marines after being arrested in Cancun, Mexico, Friday, June 6, 2008. The Mexican navy detained 38 Cubans who were traveling on a yacht off the country's Caribbean coast and believed to be heading to the United States. On Thursday, June 19, 2008, Mexican officials have confirmed that at least 18 of the Cubans caught on June 6, have reached Texas more than a week after masked gunmen hijacked an immigration bus in southern Mexico and seized them. (AP Photo/Israel Leal

CANCUN, Mexico (AP) — Hundreds of police and military sharpshooters guarded an immigration detention center in southern Mexico on Friday amid threats that gunmen would try to rescue a Cuban man being held there, a state official said.

Immigration officials received several anonymous phone calls from someone saying that assailants planned to free the man from an immigration detention center in Chetumal, the state capital, said Gumersindo Jimenez, a Quintana Roo state officer.

Jimenez initially identified the man as Cuban-American Hanoy Cardentey. He was detained Wednesday after authorities found his boat drifting off Quintana Roo's Caribbean coast and accused him of trafficking Cubans to the United States via Mexico. But Jimenez said Friday that Cardentey was released after questioning, and his companion on the boat, a Cuban man, was the one being held.

Authorities declined to say whether either man 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. This week 18 of the Cubans walked across an international bridge in 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.

Investigators are looking into whether members of the Zetas — a gang of hit men linked to drug cartels — were involved, Mexico Deputy Attorney General Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos told Televisa network late Thursday.

Vasconcelos said the gang could be making inroads into the lucrative business of human trafficking. He did not elaborate.

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

In recent years, several Cuban-Americans believed to be smuggling people have turned up dead in the Yucatan Peninsula, which lies just 120 miles 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.

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

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

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