Mexico City prosecutors have confirmed that the man murdered this Sunday during an armed attack in the capital’s Zona Rosa was Óscar Medina, alias Le Panouwho served as head of security for the Los Chapitos faction within the Sinaloa Cartel. The Public Prosecutor’s Office carried out expert assessments which certified the identity of the man who was the main lieutenant of Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar, Joaquín’s eldest son. El Chapo Guzmán, former head of the criminal organization. According to the report from the Citizen Security Secretariat (SSC) of the capital, the attack on Medina took place this Sunday while he was eating in a restaurant in the Juárez neighborhood, on Niza Street. It was in the premises that two individuals began shooting at him and his companions, a man and a woman. The hitmen fled on motorcycles.
The identity of the murdered person remained shrouded in mystery for several days. It was only this Christmas Thursday that the authorities in the capital confirmed that it was El Panu. According to the U.S. State Department, El Panu was a high-ranking leader in the ranks of the Sinaloa Cartel and the day-to-day commander of the security apparatus of Guzmán Salazar and his Los Chapitos brothers. Medina oversaw each of the regional commanders of the Chapo Heirs faction.
The federal drug agency of the neighboring country to the north, the DEA, offered a reward of up to $4 million for information leading to the arrest or conviction of the lieutenant, “for crimes related to international drug trafficking, as well as for his alleged operational role within the Sinaloa cartel, a criminal organization with transnational impact”, indicates the press release from the prosecutor’s office in the capital, which opened an investigation for capital homicide.
Much of the confusion over Panu’s identity relates to his wife’s statement after the murder. The woman, María José Rojo, model, daughter of Sinaloa’s undersecretary of tourism, assures that her husband’s name was Óscar Ruiz and that he was a hotelier from Mazatlán, on the Sinaloa coast, who was visiting the capital with his family for the Christmas holidays. Another plot point concerns the authorities’ intelligence apparatus. The murder occurred a few blocks from the offices of the Attorney General’s Office (FGR), in one of the busiest neighborhoods. With such freedom, one of the Sinaloa Cartel’s most high-profile men and one of the most wanted by the United States has set up shop in the heart of the city.
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