MEXICANS TWICE MISIDENTIFY MAN KILLED IN SHOOTING WITH DRUG LINK

MEXICO CITY, March 24 - The authorities acknowledged today that they had
twice misidentified a man killed in a shooting on Thursday. For several
hours after the shooting in a hotel restaurant here, law enforcement
officials identified the man in written statements as Cuauhtemoc Herrera
Suastegui, a former senior aide to Mexico's attorney general. He resigned
in January after becoming the target of a drug investigation.

Mr. Herrera was shot in the attack but survived. He is in stable but
guarded condition with a back wound. His defense lawyer and a woman who had
been with him were also wounded. The man who was killed was finally
identified as Mr. Herrera's driver.

Mexico's top drug prosecutor, Mariano Herran Salvatti, had discussed Mr.
Herrera's supposed demise on a late-night television newscast, only to
realize he was in error later, when forensic doctors sent him a photo of
the body from the morgue.

"I know Herrera because I've worked with him, and that wasn't him," Mr.
Herran Salvatti said in an interview today.

He added that Mexico City detectives first erred when they found a document
identifying the victim as Capt. Cuauhtemoc Najera of the army, but
announced the victim as Cuauhtemoc Herrera.

Correcting that mistake, they then jumped to the conclusion that the dead
man was Cuauhtemoc Najera. But they later found reason to doubt the
validity of the Najera identity document. Just before midnight, the
authorities identified the dead man as Sergio Jorge Chavez, Mr. Herrera's
driver.

Samuel Del Villar, the Mexico City district attorney, said today that five
men had been detained but that the police were still seeking a man whom Mr.
Herrera and a Canadian tourist described as the gunman who burst into the
Imperial Hotel firing at Mr. Herrera and his lawyer.

The attack on Mr. Herrera attracted special attention because William E.
Ledwith, a senior Drug Enforcement Administration official, cited him at a
Feb. 29 hearing in Congress in Washington as an example of corruption in
Mexican anti-drug units.

Mr. Herrera, while serving as the No. 2 official in an elite federal
narcotics investigations unit for the attorney general, failed a lie
detector test given by American officials in September 1998, and other
evidence suggested that he was collaborating with traffickers, Mr. Ledwith
said.

Despite those warning signs, Mr. Herrera was not dismissed from the
attorney general's staff. Instead he was transferred to a diplomatic post
in Spain, the authorities said.

Mr. Herran Salvatti said today that after the authorities discovered Mr.
Herrera's name on documents confiscated from traffickers in Cancun, Mr.
Herrera became the target of a drug investigation in mid-1999, about the
time he returned to Mexico from Spain. But although he was the target of a
criminal investigation, he kept his job on the attorney general's staff,
although in a lowly post.

He resigned voluntarily on Jan. 14. He had been scheduled to meet with an
aide to Mr. Herran Salvatti today, to respond to prosecutors' questions,
Mr. Herran Salvatti said.

From his hospital bed today, Mr. Herrera told detectives that he had asked
for the meeting with prosecutors to request their help in clearing his name.