MEXICAN DRUG LORD ELUSIVE IN DEATH

MEXICO CITY (AP) - For nearly a decade, elusive and violent drug lord
Ramon Arellano Felix has existed largely as a blurry photograph on
the FBI's 10 most wanted list. Two weeks after his reported death in
a shootout with police, he is proving just as hard to pin down.

Arellano Felix blazed a violent trail of crime, including murder,
during his infamous career, eluding Mexican and U.S. authorities for
at least nine years.

More recently, authorities have been struggling to confirm that the
gunman killed in the shootout was Arellano Felix - but they can't
find the body, and now they say it has been cremated.

The corpse was picked up from a funeral home in the northern state of
Sinaloa by a man claiming to be the cousin of a dead man named Jorge
Perez Lopez - a sort of ``John Smith'' alias believed to have been
used by Arellano Felix.

``We know the body was cremated at the request of people who
identified themselves as relatives. We are investigating whether they
were in fact relatives,'' Mexican Attorney General Rafael Macedo said
Sunday.

It was skullduggery right up to the end: The man who picked up the
body used false identification to do so, and legal experts said it
was suspicious that the body was released before a full autopsy was
performed.

Cremation cheats police both out of evidence and the interesting
chance to watch for wanted guests at the large, elaborate funerals
the northern drug clans traditionally hold for fallen drug lords.

Even if he is dead, details of Arellano Felix's trail of blood
continue to come to light in the wake of the Feb. 10 shootout in the
coastal resort city of Mazatlan.

Macedo said a gun found in Lopez's - or Arellano Felix's - car has
been identified as the weapon used in the Nov. 11 slaying of two
federal judges and one of their wives in Mazatlan. The judges had
presided over drug cases in another northern state, Tamaulipas, and
had reportedly ruled against an appeal by a drug trafficker.

Meanwhile, federal investigators sent a mobile crime lab to Mazatlan,
purportedly to do DNA testing. But is unclear what they would test -
perhaps blood spatters from the scene of the shooting - or what they
would compare the results to.

In the last decade, police have been unable to find more than a pair
of grainy photos of Arellano Felix. With police unsure what he looks
like, it's even less likely they have a DNA profile on him to provide
a match with the remains authorities believe are his.

Macedo said authorities are using various methods - blood tests,
fingerprints and comparisons of facial images - to try to establish
an identity.

Authorities on both sides of the border believe Arellano Felix - who
together with his brothers ran a Tijuana-based cocaine and marijuana
cartel - died in the shootout, struck when a a policeman he fatally
shot managed to squeeze off one last lethal return shot.

That belief is based in part on another blurry photograph - the one
on a fake police credential Arellano Felix allegedly carried, made
out in Perez Lopez's name.

If it is a match, then it appears the drug lord had tried to alter
his appearance, but hadn't had plastic surgery, as other traffickers
have.

The ID photo, taken in the 1990s, shows a man with a shaved head and
normal build; the last photographs of Arellano Felix showed him with
a heavy build and shaggy hair.

No one is absolutely sure. But as Sinaloa Gov. Juan Milan noted:
``This wasn't any common gunslinger.''