FORMER SALINAS AIDE SOUGHT TO FACE CORRUPTION ALLEGATION

MEXICO CITY -- Mexican authorities are seeking the arrest of a key aide to
former President Carlos Salinas on corruption charges, a court official
said Thursday.

Judge Olga Sanchez was asked by the attorney general's office to issue an
arrest order for Justo Ceja, who was Salinas' private secretary and who
went into hiding after the former leader's term ended in 1994.

"It shows that officials are getting closer and closer to Salinas,"
political analyst Jorge Castaneda told Radio Red.

"Ceja is one of the only people who can explain all the these doubts (about
corruption allegations) because he was closest to the president," the
analyst said.

An assistant to Sanchez said the judge was going over the case and had not
issued the warrant but that he was likely to issue it in the next few days.

Ceja also is viewed as a key witness in related cases of drug corruption
and political murder during Salinas' presidency.

Salinas fled to Ireland in early 1995 after his brother, Raul, was arrested
for allegedly masterminding the murder of a top ruling party politician.

The court source said corruption charges against Ceja stem from a
government report last year questioning a fortune of nearly $3 million that
he accumulated in the last 10 months of Salinas' term.

The Reforma and El Universal newspapers said Thursday that officials are
interested in what Ceja knows about the 1994 assassination of Jose
Francisco Ruiz Massieu, then-secretary general of the ruling Institutional
Revolutionary Party.

Raul Salinas is in a maximum-security jail near Mexico City, being held on
charges that he ordered the Ruiz Massieu murder.

Also Thursday, the attorney general's office said it had arrested Raul
Salinas' accountant, Juan Manuel Gomez Gutierrez, to face graft charges.

It said Gomez Gutierrez had put some of Salinas' ill-gotten gains from
office under his name.

After five years of being hailed as an economic reformer, Carlos Salinas
ended his term in disgrace after charges of widespread corruption and a
deep economic crisis.