Responsibility for last week's murder of a leading politician goes much higher in the ruling party than the fugitive congressman being sought by police, one of the plotters has told police.
Jose Martin Ramirez Arauz has confessed that he was part of the plot to kill Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, the No. 2 man in Mexico's ruling party who was gunned down Sept. 28, police said Tuesday.Investigators have said fugitive congressman Manuel Munoz Rocha, a member of Ruiz Massieu's own Institutional Revolutionary Party, was behind the plot.
But according to a statement from the Mexican attorney general's office, Ramirez Arauz, 32, said he was told "there were other people above him (Munoz Rocha) who had ordered the death."
The statement gave no names.
But it seemed to confirm that police believed that internal party politics and personal vengeance were behind the assas-si-na-tion, although links with drug trafficking have not been ruled out.
Ruiz Massieu, a former governor of Guerrero state and a rising star in Mexican politics, was a close ally of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.
He was shot in his car after leaving a morning meeting of recently elected congressmen from his own party.
Ramirez Arauz, who said he was hired to stake out Ruiz Massieu's home, is the eighth person arrested following the assassination.
Daniel Aguilar Trevino, an impoverished, illiterate farmhand, reportedly told police he was paid $15,000 in pesos to pull the trigger.
He was chased down by a bank guard and arrested on the scene.
Ramirez Arauz said he was hired by Fernando Rodriguez Gonzalez, a legislative aide to Munoz Rocha who is also a fugitive.