Aide Expected to Replace Tijuana Chief

TIJUANA —  A top aide to murdered municipal Police Chief Alfredo de la Torre Marquez is expected to be named as his replacement today. Meanwhile, investigators continued to hunt for additional slaying suspects, who Mexican news reports say include an assistant chief.

Tijuana Mayor Francisco Vega de la Madrid said Friday that he will name career officer Carlos Besneyrigoyen, the operations chief and No. 2 official in the 1,400-member department, as chief. Besneyrigoyen has been interim chief since Feb. 27, when De la Torre was ambushed by gunmen as he drove alone on a city highway.

Vega said approval by the City Council is expected to be a formality, because all three political parties have agreed on Besneyrigoyen. The action had to be delayed Friday for lack of a quorum after members of the Institutional Revolutionary Party sat out the council session because of a dispute over an unrelated matter.

Baja California authorities, who have arrested seven suspects in the De la Torre slaying, said Friday that the investigation is continuing.

Atty. Gen. Juan Manuel Salazar Pimentel said this week that the suspects had confessed to the chief’s murder and 14 other killings in Tijuana. Several of the slayings have gained widespread attention as symbols of a rising crime wave that includes more than 70 homicides this year in the border city of 1.3 million.

Upon announcing the arrests, Salazar said the group worked as hit men for the son of a narcotics trafficker in Sinaloa state who hoped to muscle in on turf currently dominated by the feared Arellano Felix drug gang along the border with California. One of the arrested men had police credentials identifying him as a member of an elite Special Forces squad, and a second was later identified as a former officer.

State authorities declined to officially confirm numerous Mexican news reports that investigators believe the band of gunmen included an assistant police chief and a municipal officer on active status. The reports cited unidentified sources and statements made by the detained suspects.

A city spokesman said that neither the assistant chief nor the second officer had shown up for work this week but that there had been no official notification that they were under investigation.

The news weekly Zeta reported Friday that the assistant chief, Juan de Dios Montenegro, allegedly worked with a go-between answering to the Sinaloa drug mob.

Vega said the alleged police involvement was a setback for the department’s image and his attempts to reform the agency through such provisions as higher salaries and free housing for eligible officers. “We have good officers in this department,” he said. “Tijuana has a good police department. It has been improved in a lot of different areas.”