6 Arrested in Slaying of Tijuana Chief

In a stunning announcement late Wednesday, authorities said they have arrested six suspects, including one current and some former police officers, in the ambush slaying of Tijuana Municipal Police Chief Alfredo de la Torre and the killings of 14 other people, some of them high-profile citizens.

Baja California Atty. Gen. Juan Manuel Salazar Pimentel said at a news conference that all six suspects had “confessed their participation” in all 15 slayings. Among the victims were a prominent lawyer, his wife and their son, who were killed Feb. 9 in their upscale Tijuana neighborhood. The victims also included three other law enforcement officials.

Salazar said that the suspects had confessed to being paid hit men acting at the behest of Vicente Zambada Niebla, who was described as the son of a powerful drug trafficker in the state of Sinaloa. Salazar said the hit men were acting with the goal of “destabilizing public tranquillity to create a climate of confusion that would permit [the trafficker] to widen his presence toward this border in narcotics trafficking.”

Police Chief De la Torre, 49, was driving alone to his office after attending Mass on Feb. 27 when three cars came alongside his and gunmen opened fire with at least one AK-47 assault rifle and a 9-millimeter handgun. The chief was hit 57 times and his vehicle riddled with more than 100 bullets.

Salazar said that the suspects were found with numerous semiautomatic weapons, radio transmitters and T-shirts bearing police logos. They also had a police identification belonging to one of the suspects, showing his membership in a special municipal strike force.

Salzar offered few details on the circumstances of the arrests, or on how the investigation led to the men. Zambada was not arrested.

The victims included another lawyer who was said to be closely tied to the Arellano Felix drug cartel in Tijuana, two police officers and a third lawyer who was assigned to a special government team called Grupo Beta that aims to protect migrants from crime at the border.

The extraordinary 9:30 p.m. press conference took place amid a media crush, and Salazar was accompanied by four federal drug agents wearing black ski masks to protect their identity.

It is unclear whether the arrests will quiet growing alarm over the wave of violence in Baja California, including more than 70 homicides in Tijuana alone so far this year. The crime wave recently caught the notice of Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, who dispatched the nation’s attorney general and other top federal officials to the border state for meetings on the crisis. The officials promised more spending to fight crime, and better coordination between federal authorities and overwhelmed local law enforcement officials. State and federal authorities in Baja have long blamed each other for failure to stem the crime wave.

Salazar on Wednesday praised the joint efforts of federal, state and local police in the investigation.

Dozens of police officers, judges, prosecutors and others have been murdered in Tijuana and its suburbs in recent years, a spiral of violence linked to wars between competing drug cartels. A presidential candidate of the ruling PRI party was assassinated in Tijuana in March 1994.

De la Torre was gunned down on the same expressway, Via Rapida, where one of his predecessors as municipal chief, Federico Benitez Lopez, was murdered in April 1994 in a similar ambush. That killing took place a week after Benitez reported turning down a $100,000 bribe from narcotics traffickers.

Tijuana has a long history of police corruption, but De la Torre, a career law enforcement officer who took over as chief in December 1998, was known for professionalism and honesty.

He normally was protected by bodyguards except on Sunday, which he reserved as a day for his family, officials said. In the back seat of De la Torre’s vehicle were the bodyguards’ two M-16 automatic rifles. The chief’s force of about 1,200 officers is responsible for issuing traffic citations and patrolling the neighborhoods of this sprawling city, whose population is more than 2 million. Historically, Tijuana police have been underpaid, undertrained and highly susceptible to bribery.

De la Torre held numerous jobs during his career, which began in 1973. He founded the mounted patrol for the Tijuana police and was a federal official at the international airport and a state police commander in a seaside neighborhood of Tijuana. He had also served a previous term as municipal chief in 1992.

De la Torre took over as chief after the resignation of Juan Manuel Nieves, who had crashed a police car while intoxicated, left the scene and tried to cover up the incident.

De la Torre borrowed community policing techniques from law enforcement agencies in the United States to reduce petty crime and had begun crackdowns on small-time drug dealers and smugglers of illegal immigrants.

An increasing number of Tijuana officers are attending training sessions run by San Diego police. They are being drilled in the use of firearms and how to make arrests of armed suspects.

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Times staff writer Miles Corwin contributed to this report.