Mexico Killing Called Theft-Linked
Evidence suggests that last weekend’s slaying of Finance Minister Guillermo Ortiz Martinez’s brother was a botched robbery and not politically motivated, Mexican police said Tuesday.
Police said Alejandro Ortiz Martinez, a 55-year-old bank official, was killed Saturday after he tried to pull a gun on two would-be robbers who accosted him as he sat in his Mercedes-Benz in an upscale neighborhood of Mexico City.
Based on a reconstruction of the killing, police said that after Ortiz reached for a gun under his seat, one of the criminals shot him twice in the head, took his gun and fled.
“This reaffirms our hypothesis that it was an attempted robbery,” said Luis Roberto Gutierrez Flores, director of the capital’s judicial police department.
Family members said Ortiz always carried a gun for protection and had reportedly used it just weeks earlier to defend himself from a similar attack.
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