El Chapo and ex-Mexican government minister among group charged with trafficking guns

​Mexican prosecutors say they have charged seven people — including drug kingpin ​Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and the country’s former security minister — as part of an investigation into the “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal. 

​Along with Guzman, ​the former head of the Sinaloa drug cartel, ex-Security Minister Genaro Garcia Luna and former top federal police official Luis Cardenas Palomino were hit with weapons trafficking charges, according to a statement released Sunday by the office of Mexico’s attorney general. 

All three are already in custody, either in the US or Mexico.

Guzman is serving a life sentence at a federal “supermax” prison in Colorado. 

As part of the operation that ran from 2009 to 2011, federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed criminals to buy weapons with the intention of tracking them to Mexican drug cartels. ​

More than 2,000 weapons were tracked crossing the US-Mexican border and many wound up in the hands of cartel members.

Mexico’s Public Security Minister Genaro Garcia Luna was slapped with a weapons trafficking charge.
REUTERS/Tomas Bravo/File Photo/File Photo
Luis Cardenas Palomino was arrested in May of 2020 on a weapons trafficking charge along with his boss Genaro Garcia Luna.
Luis Cardenas Palomino was arrested in May of 2020 on a weapons trafficking charge along with his boss Genaro Garcia Luna.
OMAR TORRES/AFP/GettyImages
Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman was charged in the "fast and furious" probe but, he is already serving a life sentence in a US supermax security prison.
Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was charged in the “Fast and Furious” probe and is already serving a life sentence in a US supermax security prison.
United States Drug Enforcement Administration via AP, File

Some of the guns were used in gangland slayings, while two weapons found at the scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder in 2010 were traced to “Fast and Furious.”

Luna, who was arrested in Texas in 2019 and faces trial in the US, served as security chief and headed up the Mexican government’s fight against organized crime in former President Felipe Calderon’s administration. 

Palomino, Luna’s right-hand man, was arrested in Mexico in July.

With Post wires

This article was originally posted here