MEXICAN PUZZLE: IS MISSING BODY A MOST-WANTED DRUG KINGPIN?

MEXICO CITY -- Mexico's attorney general said today that the government was
investigating whether a man shot to death on Feb. 10 in the resort town of
Mazatlan was Ramon Arellano Felix, one of the world's leading cocaine kingpins.

The body has disappeared, the authorities said.

Mr. Arellano Felix, 37, the chief enforcer for Mexico's most violent and
powerful drug cartel, was the first Mexican cocaine trafficker ever placed
on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's list of 10 most wanted fugitives.

The F.B.I.'s Web site now has him at the top of that list, alongside Osama
bin Laden. The United States is offering $2 million for information leading
to his conviction.

But without the body of the man in question, there is no proof that Mr.
Arellano Felix is dead. "We're working to confirm that," said the attorney
general, Rafael Macedo de la Concha. Facts today were few, if tantalizing.

The case so far, which Mr. Macedo de la Concha called "a hypothesis," began
on the night of Feb. 10, when the state police of Sinaloa, on Mexico's
Pacific coast, fought a gun battle with a group of men in Mazatlan. When
the smoke cleared, three men were dead.

One of them carried a federal police identification card in the name of
Jorge Perez Lopez, a name about as common as Joe Smith. A daily newspaper,
Noroeste, published a photograph of the card today. It bore a picture of a
man resembling Mr. Arellano Felix.

On Feb. 11 an unidentified group of people claimed the body from a funeral
home and vanished, according to Noroeste. Mr. Macedo de la Concha confirmed
that his office was trying to "determine what happened to the body."

Every important Mexican law enforcement agency has been assigned to destroy
the Arellano Felix cartel, which is based in Tijuana. The group has killed
dozens of police officers, prosecutors and judges in the last decade and is
believed to have corrupted hundreds more. Mexican officials hold the group
responsible for the murder of the Roman Catholic archbishop of Guadalajara,
Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo, in 1993.

Despite help from American agencies, including the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and
the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Mexican authorities have found the
Arellano Felix group elusive.

The drug agency's director, Asa Hutchinson, said in Mexico City on Thursday
that the group had "enormous resources," including "large financial assets"
and "a lot of firepower," which "makes it difficult to get the intelligence
we need" to arrest its leaders.

But he said bringing the group to justice was one of the highest law
enforcement goals of the United States.