Mexico Says Kidnap Suspects Linked to High-Profile Cases

A group of alleged kidnappers arrested over the weekend is being linked by prosecutors to a cocky, well-armed mafia accused of some of Mexico’s most spectacular abductions.

Eight people were arrested Sunday in the central Pacific coast state of Nayarit. A spokesman for the state attorney general’s office, Jesus Cervantes, said they were part of a larger organization.

“The gang has approximately 80 members but [is] divided in organizations in which only the leaders know one another,” he said. “Each group is different, but they depend on the same supreme command.”

Cervantes said prosecutors have linked the group to the 1996 kidnapping of Japanese businessman Mamoru Konno in Tijuana and to the abduction of ranchera singer Vicente Fernandez’s son. Konno, president of Sanyo Video Components, was freed after nine days for an estimated $2-million ransom. Vicente Fernandez Jr. was kidnapped in May 1998 and released four months later after payment of a reported $3.2-million ransom--and after his abductors cut off two of his fingers.

Cervantes said the organization has held captives as long as seven months and sometimes sends bits of fingers to relatives. It charges ransoms in dollars and uses automatic weapons loaded with explosive cartridges.

He said anti-kidnapping police from at least eight states are questioning the suspects arrested over the weekend.

He identified the suspects as Carlos Rojas, Roberto and Adalberto Arellano, Justo Mayor, Arturo Torres, Pedro Gutierrez, Andres Brito and Maria del Rosario Peregrino.

The arrests came after one of the suspects visited a hospital in Tepic, the Nayarit state capital, for treatment of a bullet wound. He admitted that he had been shot during a dispute over division of a ransom.

Cervantes said the organization’s roots go back more than a decade.