U.S. SUBMITS REPORT VERIFYING EX-MEXICAN OFFICIAL'S DEATH

Former Mexican Attorney General Mario Ruiz Massieu is dead, despite
persistent reports in the Mexican media that he is in the U.S. witness
protection program, say court documents filed by the Justice Department.

Prosecutor Robert E. O'Neill filed documents late Monday saying Ruiz
Massieu died Sept. 15, apparently of a medication overdose. Based on that,
U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal formally dismissed, at O'Neill's request,
the Aug. 23 money-laundering indictment against Ruiz Massieu.

A Mexican official said tissue samples and fingerprints taken to Mexico
City confirm the former attorney general died last month, probably at his
own hand.

Recent stories in the newspaper El Universal and other Mexican publications
have raised questions about the death of the man accused of providing
protection to the Gulf drug cartel and other trafficking organizations.

An El Universal story said the body has not been seen by anyone and raised
a question of whether Ruiz Massieu was giving prosecutors information about
drug activities on both sides of the border.

But Alejandro Diaz De Leon, attache to the Mexican ambassador in
Washington, D.C., said those reports are untrue.

Diaz De Leon said he and a deputy attache viewed the body at the Bergen
County, N.J., Medical Examiner's Office on Sept. 16, after a storm delayed
their arrival the day before.

Diaz De Leon said he and Ruiz Massieu attended school together in Acapulco
and their paths crossed often during their work with the government. "I
knew him very well. There is no question it was him," Diaz De Leon said.

The medical examiner's office confirmed the positive visual identification
by Diaz De Leon and the deputy attache.

The two also retrieved fingerprints from the body, the death scene and the
original arrest file, he said.

Diaz De Leon said he packed tissue samples from the liver, kidney and skin
in sterile medical tubes and took them to Mexico City on Sept. 17 for DNA
testing.

Those tests, however, have not yet been performed, he said.

Mexico's former attorney general died of an apparent overdose of
antidepressants three days before his arraignment on a 25-count
money-laundering indictment returned in Houston.

A key adviser to former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Ruiz
Massieu was found in his New Jersey apartment by officers with the
Palisades Park Police Department.

Justice Department spokesman John Russell said an autopsy was performed,
but the exact cause of death has not yet been determined because toxicology
tests have not been completed. Those tests of the level of alcohol and
drugs in the bloodstream typically take up to six weeks.

Ruiz Massieu was pronounced dead at 2:27 p.m. on Sept. 15 in the emergency
room at Englewood Hospital in Englewood, N.J., said Lt. Joseph Crowley of
the Bergen County Sheriff's Department.

The Ruiz Massieu family has been at the heart of the political feuds,
scandals and assassinations that have rocked Mexico in the past six years.

Mario Ruiz Massieu's eldest brother, Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, was
assassinated on a downtown Mexico City street in September 1994.

At the time, Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu was second-in-command of Mexico's
long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

Salinas appointed Mario Ruiz Massieu, who was serving as Mexico's top drug
prosecutor at the time, to investigate his brother's assassination.

In November 1994, Ruiz Massieu shocked the nation by announcing that his
brother was killed by a conspiracy within the ruling party.

Although a lone gunman was tried and convicted of the murder, Salinas'
brother, Raul, was arrested in February 1995 on charges of ordering it
done. He was convicted in January and given 50 years in prison, later
reduced to about 30.

Raul Salinas has also been charged with "illicit enrichment" for allegedly
taking hundreds of millions in bribes from Mexican drug traffickers.

Following Raul Salinas' arrest, Ruiz Massieu shocked Mexico again by
fleeing the country, just ahead of the agent sent to arrest him on charges
of covering up the assassination conspiracy.

Ruiz Massieu was subsequently charged in Mexico with taking bribes from one
of Mexico's top drug traffickers, Juan Garcia Abrego.

At the same time, prosecutors in Houston alleged he accepted protection
money from drug cartels while Mexico's top drug prosecutor, using an
intermediary to deposit the money in Texas Commerce Bank between 1993 and
1995.

He was first arrested in March 1995 while boarding a flight to Madrid at
the Newark International Airport. U.S. Customs officials said he failed to
declare that he was taking $46,000 in cash out of the United States. That
charge was later dismissed.

He fought a four-year battle against extradition to Mexico, while
unsuccessfully fending off a civil action to forfeit $9 million in alleged
drug proceeds.

Ruiz Massieu, the highest-ranking Mexican official ever implicated in
drug-related wrongdoing, had been free on a $500,000 bond when he died, and
was not in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service.