The U.S. Department of Justice reported this Thursday the arrest of the Mexican judge Luis Benítez Alcántara, who is alleged to have taken bribes totaling two million dollars in exchange for using his position to favor the U.S. drug trafficker Ryan Wedding.
As the agency detailed in its official accounts, the capture took place last Sunday in Colombia, after a grand jury in the United States filed nine charges against him. Benítez Alcántara, 49, is said to have "accepted a two million dollar bribe (€1.7 million) in exchange for ordering the release of the second-in-command of the famous Canadian drug trafficker and former Olympic athlete Ryan James Wedding".
The Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States (FBI, for its acronym in English) emphasized that the intervention by the magistrate occurred at a time when Wedding "was leading a transnational criminal organization valued at one billion dollars and was Canada’s largest supplier of cocaine, with connections in Colombia, Mexico and the United States".
In this way, this district judge in Mexico City is accused of "having assisted said person (Wedding) for the purpose of obstructing or preventing his arrest, trial or punishment".
Wedding, 44, had been a fugitive on charges related to the trafficking of large quantities of cocaine and an assassination, until he was detained in Mexico and subsequently handed over to U.S. authorities last January.
The former member of the Canadian snowboarding team at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City appeared on the list of the ten most wanted fugitives by the FBI and is accused of belonging to the Sinaloa Cartel and of heading a cocaine shipping network to the United States and Canada in recent years.