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| What does 2010 hold for British politics? British politicians are delivering their new year messages ahead of next year's election. What is your reaction? newsforums.bbc.co.uk |
Iran prosecutor accused over deaths by torture Parliamentary inquiry blames Kahrizak prison prosecutor and charges 12 officials over deaths of three protestersA parliamentary inquiry has found a former prosecutor responsible for the death by torture of at least three protesters detained after the disputed June elections, according to a conservative Iranian website.Saeed Mortazavi was the Tehran city prosecutor responsible for monitoring Kahrizak prison.The Alef Web site, which reported the results of the inquiry, is close to conservative lawmaker Ahmad Tavakoli.It said Mortazavi personally ordered that detained protesters be taken to Kahrizak. Iran's judiciary has charged 12 unidentified officials at the jail – three of them with murder. AP TehranIranHuman rightsProtestguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Arturo Beltrán Leyva obituary Notorious kingpin in Mexico's drug turf warsArturo Beltrán Leyva, who has died in his late 40s, was a Mexican drug baron who had recently claimed the title El jefe de jefes (the boss of bosses), but whose life ended in exactly the way that the popular imagination demands of such a figure: he was riddled with bullets while trying to shoot himself out of a massive special forces cordon that had been closing in on him for weeks.His life was similarly cinematic. The child who grew up in an isolated mountain area long known for poppy cultivation developed into a valued lieutenant in other people's drug cartels. But a story of ambition and betrayal would turn Beltrán into a key player in the nation's worst yet drug turf wars, which have killed around 16,000 people in the past three years.He was born in the highland municipality of Badiraguato, in the northern Pacific state of Sinaloa – the cradle of Mexican drug trafficking that has produced generations of kingpins. The eldest of five brothers, he took the leading role in a traditional family-based smuggling gang. It gained significance in the mid-1980s as one of the Mexican organisations that jumped in to take advantage of cocaine trafficking opportunities opened up by the demise of the big Colombian cartels.For the next 20 years, Beltrán was an important, but second-tier, partner in alliances with more powerful figures. First he acted under the godfather of big-time trafficking in Mexico, Miguel Ãngel Félix Gallardo, who was arrested in 1989. After that he gave his loyalty to Amado Carillo Fuentes, whose cartel, based in the city of Ciudad Juarez, was the dominant organised crime force through much of the 1990s, until Carillo died while undergoing a plastic surgery procedure in 1997.A few years later, Beltrán joined a loose alliance of Sinaloa-associated drug barons that became known as the Federation and would become the most successful trafficking organisation of the new millennium. Its leading light, though not supreme leader, was JoaquÃn Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo (Shorty). A distant relative of Beltrán's, El Chapo had, thanks to Beltrán's assistance, continued to live in style while he was incarcerated in the high-security jail from which he escaped in January 2001.Beltrán was later dispatched by the Federation on a rather unsuccessful attempt to move in on the north-western territories, controlled by its main rival, the Gulf cartel, and its paramilitary wing, Los Zetas. He was much more adept, however, at corrupting the upper echelons of federal government, reportedly paying $450,000 a month to one of the officials he controlled at the top of the anti-organised-crime unit of the attorney general's office. He also developed an impressive operations base in Mexico City's international airport.By the end of 2007 Beltrán was reportedly fed up with playing second fiddle to other drug barons. Then, in January 2008, when his brother Alfredo was arrested, Beltrán suspected that El Chapo had put the army on his brother's trail. Three months later he sent a hit squad to gun down his one-time protecter's son outside a superstore.Thus the Sinaloa branch of Mexico's drug wars began with the particular vengeance born of shared experience: the main protagonists had grown up together and knew each other's secrets – from the location of safe houses to the identities of those officials who were on the payroll. The Beltrán Leyva cartel reinforced its side of the dispute by forming an alliance with its erstwhile enemy, Los Zetas.By then, the authorities and the media had begun to refer to the Beltrán Leyva cartel in its own right, with Arturo as its unquestioned leader. A gang of the cartel's hit men was arrested in January 2008, as they allegedly prepared to kill Mexico's then drug tsar; they were wearing bullet-proof jackets emblazoned with the letters FEDA – the Spanish acronym for Special Forces of Arturo. Beltrán was also the prime suspect in the killing of the commissioner of the federal police, Édgar Eusebio Millán Gómez, in May 2008, and many assumed he was behind the murder of a key protected witness in a Starbucks coffee shop in Mexico City last month, as well as the many underworld rivals he had eliminated, leaving a message from El jefe de jefes by their bodies. The Mexican government had listed Beltrán as one of its most wanted drug lords and had offered a $2.1m reward for his capture.Beltrán narrowly escaped a special forces raid on 11 December at a Christmas party in Tepotzlan, just south of the capital, but he was tracked down – by 200 Mexican marines, a navy helicopter, and two small army tanks – to an exclusive apartment complex in the nearby city of Cuernavaca, and killed, along with four other members of the cartel, in the ensuing shootout.He is survived by his brothers, Mario Alberto, Carlos, Alfredo and Héctor.• (Marcos) Arturo Beltrán Leyva, drug trafficker, born circa 1960, died 16 December 2009Drugs tradeMexicoJo Tuckmanguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
For Haiti's Devastated People, Aid Comes Unequally As rescuers race against time, it's the poorest parts of the city that seem to wait the longest feedproxy.google.com |
PS3 'hacked' by iPhone cracker A hacker who gained notoriety for unlocking the iPhone as a teenager says that he has now hacked Sony's PlayStation 3. news.bbc.co.uk |