Mexico police score rare win in soccer coach rescue
Berated for endemic corruption and their failure to defeat drug cartels, Mexico’s police basked in a rare victory against organized crime on Thursday after the bloodless rescue of a kidnapped soccer coach.
Federal agents sprung Ruben Omar Romano, the Argentine coach of leading team Cruz Azul, from captivity in a house in the crime-ridden neighborhood of Iztapalapa on Wednesday night, without a shot being fired. Seven people were arrested.
Romano, who was being held for a $5 million ransom that was never paid, spent two months blindfolded in the house after being seized by men with automatic weapons near the team’s training ground in the south of Mexico City.
The case raised the fear barometer even higher in Mexico, where almost everyone knows someone who has been abducted, mostly commonly in an “express kidnapping” of a few hours.
Kidnappers often turn out to be in league with corrupt cops but in the Romano release, an elite anti-kidnapping team of federal agents staged a smooth rescue operation.
“I hope all the Mexicans begin to believe in these people, who have done a great job,” Romano, chain smoking cigarettes and looking tired, told a news conference on Thursday.
His abductors had given him decent food, soft drinks, coffee and cigarettes. But he was forced to eat everything with his hands in case he used a knife or fork to try to escape.
“They treated me very well, I can’t deny that,” he said.
He said he would be back at work at the weekend in charge of Cruz Azul, one of Mexico’s top soccer teams. It has had its best start to a season for years despite his absence.
POLICE RAID
Some 50 members of the AFI police force dressed in black combat gear stormed the three-storey house and found Romano tied to a bed. The kidnappers put up no resistance.
Police said intelligence, including phone tapping, had helped them track the kidnappers, led by a hardened criminal gang leader who masterminded the abduction from behind bars.
Mexican federal police are regarded as less corrupt than poorly paid and untrained state or municipal cops.
President Vicente Fox sent hundreds of troops and federal agents to the infamous city Nuevo Laredo on the U.S. border in June to take over the fight against drug gangs from a local police force corrupted to the core by narcotics trafficking money.
The government is struggling to stop a drug feud that has killed more than 1,000 people in northern and western Mexico so far this year.
A crime crackdown in the capital, based on former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s policy of “zero tolerance", has done little to stop car thefts and minor robberies, which in turn lead to more serious crime.
“Kidnapping is going to continue to be a major problem for as long as criminals are not tackled before they turn into kidnappers,” said Maria Elena Morera, head of an anti-crime pressure group.
Mexico City’s mayor, Alejandro Encinas, said city authorities will step up security inside jails, starting with the prison where Romano’s abduction was planned. He said the city has started to buy devices that can block cell phone calls coming in and out of prisons.
Source: alertnet.org
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Source: Signonsandeigo.com
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