Ex-President’s Brother Held in Mexico Slaying : Assassination: Raul Salinas de Gortari is accused of masterminding the killing of ruling party’s No. 2 official.

Federal agents arrested the elder brother of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari on Tuesday, charging him with masterminding last year’s assassination of the ruling party’s No. 2 official.

This was the second bombshell President Ernesto Zedillo’s government has dropped in less than a week on his own long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI.

Pablo Chapa Bezanilla--Atty. Gen. Antonio Lozano’s trusted special prosecutor--announced that Raul Salinas de Gortari, 48, was in custody on charges of “masterminding the crime of homicide,” after a two-month investigation linked him to the gangland-style slaying of PRI Secretary General Francisco Ruiz Massieu outside a Mexico City hotel in September.

Chapa said investigators determined that the president’s brother “co-authored” the crime with ruling party legislator Manuel Munoz Rocha, charged last fall with heading an internal party conspiracy to kill Ruiz Massieu.

Munoz Rocha remains at large, despite an international manhunt; investigators have speculated that he too may be dead.

The day after the Sept. 28 murder, Chapa said, Munoz Rocha made two telephone calls from a hide-out just north of the capital--one to Raul Salinas. The prosecutor said seven witnesses testified that the men “had a very close relationship.” Munoz Rocha’s private secretary said the legislator told him that Raul Salinas planned and financed the killing. “The last place Munoz Rocha visited before he disappeared . . . was the home (of Salinas),” Chapa said.

The special prosecutor said the elder Salinas denied in his statement to investigators “having any relationship with Manuel Munoz Rocha” and added that he has had no contact with him in more than 20 years.

Tuesday’s shocking arrest came just four days after Lozano stunned the nation by disclosing the arrest of a second gunman in last year’s assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio, the ruling party’s presidential candidate.

Investigators have indicated that Colosio’s assassination resulted from a similar conspiracy and subsequent cover-up by longtime ruling party faithful in the border city of Tijuana. That case remains open, with Lozano declaring that only the first phase of the investigation has ended.

But, indicating that the investigation of the Ruiz Massieu slaying will look no higher in the ruling party, Chapa added that unless further evidence is presented, “the case would be considered to have run its course with regard to its masterminds.”

The two assassinations have contributed heavily to the uncertainty that continues to fuel Mexico’s economic crisis. Both killings remain a subject of speculation, despite special commissions Salinas personally appointed to investigate them.

Zedillo reopened both cases when he took office, assigning them to his handpicked attorney general--the only opposition party member ever to serve in a ruling party Cabinet. And as recently as Monday, Zedillo vowed that both killings would be investigated until their masterminds were identified and punished. “The Mexican people do not fear the truth,” the president said. “We want to know it and we have a right to it.”

Amid calls from opposition and ruling party senators for deeper investigations of the former president’s role in the Colosio killing, Carlos Salinas came out of seclusion here to deliver an unprecedented statement by telephone on national television Tuesday before his brother’s arrest was announced. The former president denied that his government had covered up the Colosio killing.

“For reasons of honor, the attorney general should state without ambiguity that there was no cover-up by me and he should specify my absolute support for the special investigator,” he declared, departing radically from the tradition in which Mexico’s former presidents remain silent after they leave office.

He made no mention of his brother’s arrest or the Ruiz Massieu case. “I reaffirm my loyalty and my respect to the president,” Salinas added, addressing the man he picked as his successor after Colosio’s death. He asked only that Zedillo’s government make it clear that its predecessor was not to blame for the economic crisis that has enveloped this country.

In arresting the elder Salinas--a controversial businessman often linked to conservative ruling party hard-liners during his brother’s six-year term--Lozano was not the first to connect Ruiz Massieu’s slaying to the PRI.

Mario Ruiz Massieu--the victim’s brother and a former deputy attorney general--led the first official investigation of the assassination. He resigned in anger and frustration from his post and from the PRI one week before Zedillo took office Dec. 1. He asserted that the killing of his brother resulted from a conspiracy hatched in the party and accused the PRI’s top two officials of obstructing justice with an attempted cover-up.

“Luis Donaldo Colosio and Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu were killed for their reformist ideas,” he declared in a recently published book on his brother’s killing titled “I Accuse.” “The only question left hanging in the air by both crimes is perhaps the most dramatic. ‘Who will be next?’ ”

During his investigation, Mario Ruiz Massieu arrested more than a dozen people who he said played roles in a complex conspiracy that led directly to Munoz Rocha.

In the weeks after those disclosures, political sources and news reports also linked Munoz Rocha and Raul Salinas. One report said the elder Salinas had been a friend of Rocha as far back as Salinas’ years at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, from which he graduated in 1969 with a civil engineering degree.

Raul Salinas served in several official posts during his brother’s time as president. Then, in December, 1993, he declared that he was not seeking a public post and that he would devote his life to research. But there were widespread published reports that he was involved in questionable personal financial transactions during the time his brother launched the revolutionary economic reforms that privatized Mexico’s banks, telecommunications and other key sectors.