Honduran Gang Leader Wanted In Bus Attack Being Held in Texas
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras -- A Honduran official said Wednesday that one of the country's most notorious gang leaders, wanted in the killing of 28 people in a bus attack in December, had been captured in Texas.
Security Minister Oscar Alvarez, who at a news conference announced the arrest of Ebert Anibal Rivera, head of the Mara Salvatrucha gang in Honduras, said, "We are trying to find out if the U.S. authorities will press charges against him, and if not, we will immediately ask for his extradition."
In Washington, the Department of Homeland Security said Rivera, 29, was arrested after a vehicle stop in Falfurrias, Tex., on Feb. 10. He was later handed over to the Border Patrol.
A half-dozen men armed with assault rifles stopped a bus in the northern city of San Pedro Sula on Dec. 23 and opened fire on passengers. Six of those killed were children. Honduras said the Mara Salvatrucha carried out the attack as a warning to the government, which began a crackdown on youth gangs in 2003.
Police have arrested 12 others in the attack, but Rivera is the suspected organizer.
THE AMERICAS
• RIO DE JANEIRO -- A Brazilian environmentalist was killed in an Atlantic rain forest 10 days after the killing in the Amazon jungle of an activist American nun.
Police said Dionisio Ribeiro Filho, 59, was shot in the head Tuesday at the Tingua federal reserve, which he had defended for more than 15 years from poachers and illegal palm tree cutters. The head of the reserve said Ribeiro had received death threats for some time.
On Feb. 12, human rights and environmental activist Dorothy Stang was gunned down in a suspected contract killing by illegal loggers and ranchers encroaching on a federal peasant farming reserve she helped establish in the state of Para.
• ASUNCION, Paraguay -- President Nicanor Duarte fired his interior minister and dozens of ranking police officers a week after the kidnapped daughter of a former Paraguayan leader was found dead.
The ouster of Interior Minister Nelson Mora and the officers, who include the chief of criminal investigations and the chief of police intelligence, is the biggest such shake-up in Paraguay in more than a decade.
• BOGOTA, Colombia -- Colombia's Supreme Court authorized the extradition to the United States of Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, who along with his brother Gilberto helped found the Cali drug cartel, the court's spokesman said.
EUROPE
• MOSCOW -- Prosecutors charged an ethnic Chechen with murder in last year's slaying of an American journalist, according to Russian news reports.
Muslim Ibragimov, also known as Kazbek Dukuzov, was accused of involvement in the contract slaying of Paul Klebnikov, 41, the editor of Forbes magazine's Russian edition, the Interfax and ITAR-Tass news agencies reported.
ASIA
• HELSINKI -- Indonesia's government and separatist rebels made headway in talks aimed at ending nearly 30 years of fighting in Aceh province, with both sides agreeing to outside involvement and the insurgents scrapping, at least publicly, a desire for independence.
• KABUL, Afghanistan -- Two Afghan relief workers were found shot to death along a remote road in the southern province of Helmand, officials said. Helmand was a stronghold of the ousted Taliban movement.
-- From News Services
