11 Mexican Agents Are Charged With Kidnapping

Eleven federal agents were charged with kidnapping for picking up four alleged drug hit men and possibly helping kill them, the Mexican attorney general’s office said Thursday.

At least one of the presumed hit men was shot in the head, a slaying recorded on a homemade DVD, excerpts of which were published Thursday on the websites of the Dallas Morning News and the Kitsap Sun, a newspaper in Bremerton, Wash. Neither paper posted the shooting.

The federal agents, who also face charges of drug trafficking, organized crime and weapons possession, were paid by a rival cartel, said Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, Mexico’s top anti-drug prosecutor.

Vasconcelos said he was working to gather evidence to charge the federal agents with homicide or as accessories.

The recorded killing was probably carried out as part of a dispute among rival drug gangs, Vasconcelos said. Mexican officials said Thursday that they had known about the DVD for months. The men shown in the video are purported hit men for the so-called Gulf cartel.

Jose Luis Manjarrez, spokesman for the attorney general’s office, said authorities were trying to determine who made the DVD, and were investigating allegations by the men that they had received protection from Mexican security forces.

Manjarrez said details on the DVD, such as the discussion of the April killing of radio reporter Dolores Guadalupe Garcia Escamilla in northern Mexico, gave the recording credence.

The DVD, time-stamped May 16, was sent anonymously to the Kitsap Sun last month. That newspaper forwarded it to the Morning News.

The excerpts show four men sitting bruised, bloody and bound before a curtain of black garbage bags. Prodded by an unseen interrogator, they describe themselves as hit men for the Gulf cartel, detailing how they kidnapped, tortured and killed their enemies, including the radio reporter, the Morning News reported.

“I’m a recruiter for the Zetas,” one of the men is heard saying on the DVD, referring to a band of Mexican soldiers-turned-hit men believed to work for the cartel.

On April 5, 39-year-old Escamilla, a radio reporter in Nuevo Laredo across the border from Laredo, Texas, was shot eight times by a lone assailant as she arrived at work. The attacker has not been identified.

The men also discuss what they describe as the planned killing of Alejandro Dominguez Coello, according to the Morning News.

Dominguez was gunned down June 8 hours after becoming Nuevo Laredo police chief.