Anonymous - 7-13-2005 at 05:14 PM
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=oddlyEno...
Jul 13, 2005
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican police admitted their third major mistaken arrest in a month on Tuesday after a man they hoped was drug lord Francisco
Javier Arellano Felix turned out to be a car showroom employee with a similar name.
Javier Arellano was picked up by two police officers in the northern border town of Mexicali for going through a red light, but he set alarm bells
ringing when his name was radioed in to police headquarters, local authorities said.
He was interrogated for some seven hours in an operation involving dozens of troops and prosecutors, but released once it became clear he was not the
notorious "El Tigrillo" ("The Wildcat") boss of the Arellano Felix drugs cartel.
"Obviously we got ready for the possibility that this was El Tigrillo. We mobilized the army, prosecutors, everybody," said Fernando Ruiz, spokesman
for the public security ministry in Mexicali.
"But he's just a namesake. It was a mix-up. He's called the same but he's a different person, a normal, hard-working guy."
He said Arellano, who works driving new cars between showrooms in northern Mexico, had encountered similar problems elsewhere when showing police his
identity papers, even though his name is missing both "Francisco" and "Felix."
"He told me he's had problems because of his name in Guadalajara and Tijuana. He's used to this," said Ruiz.
"He doesn't look the same, but it's known these guys use plastic surgery to completely change their faces," he added.
The Arellano Felix cartel is one of Mexico's most notorious drug gangs, hauling cocaine, marijuana, amphetamines and heroin from Tijuana and Mexicali
over the border to California.
The false alarm came days after police released a man they had believed to be another top drug lord, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, but who turned out to
be a well-known architect.
The man had a different name but resembled sketches of what Carrillo might look like after extensive plastic surgery.
In late June, Mexico boasted it had caught an international terror suspect but later said the man was a Lebanese-born tourist whose name had been left
on a blacklist by mistake.