MEXICO TO SEEK MONEY IN RUIZ MASSIEU CASE

Investigators Say They Played A Major Role

MEXICO CITY -- Mexico said Friday that it would try to get its hands on
some of the $9 million U.S. authorities seized from Mario Ruiz Massieu, the
former deputy attorney general who committed suicide Wednesday while
awaiting a U.S. trial for alleged money laundering.

A Houston jury in 1997 awarded the money to U.S. federal authorities as
part of their money-laundering investigation. But Mexico said Mexican
investigators played a major role in the case.

"We are going to demand it (the money)," Attorney General Jorge Madrazo
told Radio Red on Friday. "Those resources should be used for the
administration of justice in Mexico."

Otherwise, the case was declared all but closed Friday and officials said
they would have no more reaction to a suicide note that attempted to
implicate President Ernesto Zedillo in a 5-year-old case that led to the
downfall of some of Mexico's most powerful political figures.

The government had once accused Ruiz Massieu of covering up the murder of
his own brother, a crime that led to the arrest and conviction of former
President Carlos Salinas' brother, Raul Salinas.

"The case of Mario Ruiz Massieu is closed," a high-ranking official told
Reuters. "The attorney general (Madrazo) has declared it so."

Ruiz Massieu, 48, overdosed on anti-depressants in New Jersey just days
before he was due to face trial in Houston, officials said.

Mexico also had sought his extradition on a host of criminal charges
including torturing witnesses in custody.

Ruiz Massieu left a suicide note blaming top Mexican politicians, including
Zedillo, for driving him to his death, and said Zedillo should be
investigated for his brother's murder.

But Madrazo on Thursday dismissed the letter as "the expression of a
psychopath."

Ruiz Massieu, then the deputy attorney general, was thrust into the
spotlight by then-President Salinas, who named him as special prosecutor
into the Sept. 28, 1994, assassination of Ruiz Massieu's brother, Jose
Francisco Ruiz Massieu, then the second-ranking official in the ruling party.

Ruiz Massieu began to implicate high-ranking officials in the Institutional
Revolutionary Party (PRI), saying they were trying to quash his brother's
reformist movement.

But Ruiz Massieu then fled Mexico amid government allegations that rather
than investigate his brother's murder, he tried to cover it up and thus
cloak his own dealings and those of Salinas' brother in Mexico's drug
underworld.

Ruiz Massieu was arrested at the Newark, N.J., airport on March 3, 1995,
with a suitcase full of undeclared cash while in transit to Spain.

After Carlos Salinas left office, prosecutors arrested his brother for
allegedly plotting the Ruiz Massieu assassination. That arrest led to a
host of drug trafficking allegations against Raul Salinas.

The Salinas and Ruiz Massieu brothers once sat at the pinnacle of power in
Mexico and were related by marriage for a time. Adriana Salinas, sister of
the former president, was once married to Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu.

But since their world unraveled, the former president has fled the country
to self-imposed exile, his brother has been sentenced to 50 years in prison
and their two former brothers-in-law are dead.