The Prosecutor’s Office reopens the theory of the second shooter in the case of the murder of Luis Donaldo Colosio

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The murder of Luis Donaldo Colosio is an open case three decades later. The Attorney General’s Office (FGR) has resumed the line of investigation that leads to a plot and a second shooter in the murder, which occurred on March 23, 1994 in Tijuana (Baja California). The Prosecutor’s Office confirmed this Monday that it has accused Jorge Antonio Sánchez Ortega before a judge, a former member of Cisen, the Government’s intelligence body, who was assigned to the security team of the PRI presidential candidate.

The FGR also implicates Genaro García Luna in the case, who was then deputy operational director at Cisen and today is accused of drug trafficking in the United States. This line of investigation demolishes the theory that Mario Aburto, the confessed murderer—and who has reported having been tortured—acted alone.

Judge Alberto Chávez Hernández, however, rejected the new allegations of the Prosecutor’s Office and did not link the accused to trial. The FGR maintains that the evidence presented against Sánchez Ortega demonstrates his presence at the scene of the homicide, “at the same moment of the crime, when there was a difference of seconds between both shots.” A blood test was also added to the investigation file showing that Colosio’s blood was on his clothes, even though the former Cisen agent did not participate in taking him to the doctor after the attack. The Prosecutor’s Office indicated that there is also rodizonate evidence that indicates that Sánchez Ortega fired a weapon, in addition to “a large number” of testimonies that affirm that he fled the scene of the crime.

The Prosecutor’s Office maintains that García Luna covered up the attacker and then maneuvered to remove him from Tijuana “in an urgent and surreptitious manner.” The FGR has warned that he will appeal the judge’s decision, whom he accused not only of obstructing justice but of having made “personal” statements against the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

The reopening of the case has been led by a special prosecutor’s office headed by prosecutor Abel Galván. López Obrador instructed that the file be investigated again, three decades after an official version cracked by Aburto’s complaints that he was a victim of torture. Some critics of the Government have seen a political objective in the reopening of the investigation, at a key moment for the presidential and legislative elections.