WASHINGTON (AP) — A top assassin for the Sinaloa drug cartel who was arrested by Mexican authorities last fall has been extradited to the U.S. to face drug, gun and witness retaliation charges, the Justice Department said Saturday.
Néstor Isidro Pérez Salas, also known as “El Nini,” is a leader and commander of a group that provided security for the sons of imprisoned drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, and also helped in their drug business, federal investigators said. The sons lead a faction known as the little Chapos, or “Chapitos,” that has been identified as one of the main exporters of the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl to the U.S.
Fentanyl is blamed for about 70,000 overdose deaths per year in the United States.
“We allege El Nini was one of the Sinaloa Cartel’s lead sicarios, or assassins, and was responsible for the murder, torture, and kidnapping of rivals and witnesses who threatened the cartel’s criminal drug trafficking enterprise,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a news release Saturday.
Court records did not list an attorney for Pérez Salas who might comment on his behalf.
The Justice Department last year announced a slew of charges against cartel leaders, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration posted a $3 million reward for the capture of Pérez Salas, 31. He was captured at a walled property in the Sinaloa state capital of Culiacan last November.
In a written statement, President Joe Biden thanked Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador for extraditing Pérez Salas.
“Our governments will continue to work together to attack the fentanyl and synthetic drug epidemic that is killing so many people in our homelands and globally, and to bring to justice the criminals and organizations producing, smuggling, and selling these lethal poisons in both of our countries,” Biden said.
The nickname Nini is apparently a reference to a Mexican slang saying “neither nor,” used to describe youths who neither work nor study.
At the time of his arrest, Mike Vigil, former head of international operations for the U.S Drug Enforcement Administration, called him “a complete psychopath.”
Pérez Salas commanded a security team known as the Ninis, “a particularly violent group of security personnel for the Chapitos,” according to an indictment unsealed last year in New York. The Ninis “received military-style training in multiple areas of combat, including urban warfare, special weapons and tactics, and sniper proficiency.”
Pérez Salas participated in the torture of a Mexican federal agent in 2017, authorities said. He and others allegedly tortured the man for two hours, inserting a corkscrew into his muscles, ripping it out and placing hot chiles in the wounds.
According to the indictment, the Ninis carried out gruesome acts of violence.
The Ninis would take captured rivals to ranches owned by the Chapitos for execution, with some victims fed — dead or alive — to tigers the Chapitos raised as pets, the indictment said.
FILE - Attorney General Merrick Garland speaks during a news conference at the Justice Department in Washington, Friday, April 14, 2023. A top assassin for the Sinaloa drug cartel who was arrested by Mexican authorities last fall has been extradited to the U.S. to face drug, gun and witness retaliation charges, the Justice Department said Saturday, May 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
MOSCOW (AP) — The espionage trial in Russia of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich will begin on June 26 and will be held behind closed doors, a statement from the court that will hear the case said Monday.
Gershkovich, a U.S. citizen, has been behind bars since his March 2023 arrest and faces 20 years in prison if convicted.
The trial is to be held in the Sverdlovsky Regional Court in Yekaterinburg, Russia's fourth-largest city, where he was arrested. Gershkovich has since been held in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, about 1,400 kilometers (870 miles) to the west.
The court said trial will be closed to the public, as is usual in espionage cases.
Gershkovich, 32, is accused of “gathering secret information” on orders from the CIA about Uralvagonzavod, a facility that produces and repairs military equipment, the Prosecutor General’s office said last week in the first details of the accusations against him.
The reporter, his employer and the U.S. government have denied the allegations, and Washington designated him as wrongfully detained.
Russia’s Federal Security Service alleged that Gershkovich was acting on U.S. orders to collect state secrets but provided no evidence to back up the accusations.
“Evan has done nothing wrong. He should never have been arrested in the first place. Journalism is not a crime,” U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said last week. “The charges against him are false. And the Russian government knows that they’re false. He should be released immediately.”
The Biden administration has sought to negotiate Gershkovich's release, but Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Moscow would consider a prisoner swap only after a trial verdict.
Uralvagonzavod, a state tank and railroad car factory in the city of Nizhny Tagil, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Yekaterinburg, became known in 2011-12 as a bedrock of support for President Vladimir Putin.
Plant foreman Igor Kholmanskih appeared on Putin’s annual phone-in program in December 2011 and denounced mass protests occurring in Moscow at the time as a threat to “stability,” proposing that he and his colleagues travel to the Russian capital to help suppress the unrest. A week later, Putin appointed Kholmanskikh to be his envoy in the region.
Putin has said he believes a deal could be reached to free Gershkovich, hinting he would be open to swapping him for a Russian national imprisoned in Germany. That appeared to be Vadim Krasikov, who is serving a life sentence for the 2019 killing in Berlin of a Georgian citizen of Chechen descent.
Asked by The Associated Press about Gershkovich, Putin said the U.S. is “taking energetic steps” to secure his release. He told international news agencies at an economic forum in St. Petersburg in early June that any such releases “aren’t decided via mass media” but through a “discreet, calm and professional approach.”
“And they certainly should be decided only on the basis of reciprocity,” he added, in an allusion to a potential prisoner swap.
Gershkovich was the first U.S. journalist taken into custody on espionage charges since Nicholas Daniloff in 1986 at the height of the Cold War. Gershkovich’s arrest shocked foreign journalists in Russia, even though the country had enacted increasingly repressive laws on freedom of speech after sending troops into Ukraine.
The son of Soviet emigres who settled in New Jersey, Gershkovich is fluent in Russian and moved to the country in 2017 to work for The Moscow Times newspaper before being hired by the Journal in 2022.
U.S. Ambassador Lynne Tracy, who regularly visited Gershkovich in prison and attended his court hearings, has called the charges against him “fiction” and said that Russia is “using American citizens as pawns to achieve political ends.”
The trial of a US reporter charged with espionage in Russia is to begin June 26
The trial of a US reporter charged with espionage in Russia is to begin June 26
FILE - Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich stands in a glass cage in a courtroom at the First Appeals Court of General Jurisdiction in Moscow, Russia, April 23, 2024. Gershkovich, who has been jailed for over a year in Russia on espionage charges, will stand trial in the city of Yekaterinburg, authorities said Thursday June 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)
