Mexican federal police have arrested a fugitive on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list, Mexican authorities said.
Jorge Alberto Lopez Orozco is wanted in Elmore County, Idaho, on charges that he shot and killed three people, the FBI said. The charred remains of a woman and her sons, ages 2 and 4, were found inside a burned-out vehicle on August 11, 2002, it said. Each victim had been shot in the head or chest. The FBI was still working Friday to confirm the identity of the man in custody, said Debbie Dujanovic, a spokeswoman in the agency’s Salt Lake City, Utah, field office. The Salt Lake City office has jurisdiction in the case. An extradition order was issued in January 2007, the Mexican attorney general’s office said in a news release Thursday. A reward of up to $100,000 was being offered, the FBI said. Lopez, 33, was captured in Zihuatanejo, a city northwest of Acapulco on the Pacific Coast in southern Mexico, the Mexican attorney general’s office said. Zihuatanejo is in Guerrero state, but Lopez was transferred to a jail in neighboring Michoacan state, officials said.
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The arrest came about after investigation and intelligence work by Mexican authorities, the attorney general’s office said. According to the FBI, Lopez abducted his girlfriend, Rebecca Ramirez, and her two young sons from her father’s house in Nyssa, Oregon, on July 30, 2002. The car he had been driving was found nearly two weeks later on a rural road near Mountain Home, Idaho, officials said. It had been torched with the three bodies inside. The suspect’s brother, Simon Lopez Orozco, and Simon’s wife, Maria Cruz Garcia, have been charged with accessory to first-degree murder, the FBI said. Garcia was arrested in California three years ago, but Simon Lopez Orozco is believed still at large. Mexican officials captured another FBI Top 10 fugitive on July 17. Emigdio Preciado Jr. was wanted in connection with the shooting of two Los Angeles County, California, sheriff’s deputies in September 2000. He had been charged with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution, attempted murder of a police officer.
