Ex-Prosecutor in Colosio Case Slain

A former Mexican prosecutor who was the chief federal law enforcement authority in Tijuana when presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was assassinated there was gunned down Wednesday during a morning jog around a track in the Mexican border city.

The gangland-style slaying of Arturo Ochoa Palacios, Baja California’s former federal prosecutor, fueled the many conspiracy theories surrounding the unsolved 1994 Colosio murder, the first in a series of political killings that have changed the course of Mexican politics.

State police in Baja California said they had no leads on possible motives behind the murder of Ochoa, who died instantly at a Tijuana health club after being shot four times at close range by two assailants.

Police Cmdr. Antonio Torres Miranda, who is heading the investigation, said the killing in broad daylight before dozens of potential witnesses appeared to be a “professional” hit.

“We have no hypothesis about the murder, but the characteristics do not conform with narcotics-trafficking murders,” Torres said. “They usually don’t take place in public, as this one did, under circumstances like these.”

Torres and witnesses said Ochoa’s assassins were dressed as joggers and had been seen on the track for the past eight days. The two men approached the former prosecutor from behind, shot him once in the back of the neck and three more times after he fell; then both attackers fled over a fence toward the Tijuana River, witnesses said.

Torres told reporters that Ochoa was in the middle of a divorce and living with his girlfriend, but he declined to comment on possible connections to the Colosio killing or on widespread speculation that Ochoa was tied to the Tijuana drug underworld.

Ochoa’s older brother, Pedro, said he knew of no recent threats against his brother and had no theories about the motive for the murder.

Local law enforcement sources confirmed that the victim left his job in the federal prosecutor’s office in May 1994, and he briefly worked for Mexico’s communications and transportation ministry in Mexicali. Most recently, he headed Mexico’s federal postal service in Tijuana--where he resigned his post a month ago for unclear reasons, the sources said.

Ochoa had been appointed Baja California’s top federal prosecutor in June 1993, according to a spokesman for the attorney general’s office in Mexico City. The spokesman refused to comment on why Ochoa was removed from the Tijuana prosecutor’s post just weeks after he began investigating the March 1994 assassination of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party’s presidential candidate at a campaign rally in Tijuana.

Mario Aburto Martinez, a factory worker, was convicted of the murder and is serving a 45-year jail term. But the current special prosecutor in the case--the third in two years--has charged a second gunman and hinted at a conspiracy that may include senior government and law enforcement officials.

Eduardo Valle, a former Mexican federal investigator who fled the country after alleging that Colosio’s slaying was linked to the powerful Tijuana drug cartel headed by the Arellano Felix brothers, said he believes Ochoa’s slaying was directly linked to the assassination of the popular candidate.

“For me, the Colosio hypothesis is the most important,” he said in assessing possible motives in Wednesday’s murder. Valle added that Ochoa represented a new line of investigation that Mexico’s special prosecutor appeared to have opened within the last several days.

Mexican investigators also have said Ochoa was among the targets of a continuing investigation into corruption in Mexico’s attorney general’s office. Specifically, investigators and documents reviewed by The Times have linked Ochoa to millions of dollars in suspected payoffs to Mexico’s former second-ranking law enforcement official, Mario Ruiz Massieu.

Ochoa and Ruiz Massieu, who was released from a U.S. prison on $9-million bail last month and remains under police guard in New Jersey, were friends and colleagues, Mexican investigators said. U.S. federal prosecutors have frozen more than $9 million in Ruiz Massieu’s personal bank accounts in Houston, which they allege was the proceeds from narcotics trafficking. Ruiz Massieu has denied the charge, asserting that the money is part of his family’s fortune.

Fineman reported from Mexico City and Kraul from Tijuana.