US prosecutors lay out five-count indictment towards Joaquin Guzman Lopez after arrest operation in Texas final week.
Joaquin Guzman Lopez, the son of convicted Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, has pleaded not responsible to drug trafficking and different expenses in a United States court docket.
Guzman Lopez, wearing an orange jumpsuit, stood in a Chicago courtroom on Tuesday along with his toes shackled as federal prosecutors detailed a five-count indictment that additionally contains weapons expenses.
US District Decide Sharon Johnson Coleman ordered him detained pending trial. The choose didn’t set a trial date and scheduled the subsequent court docket date within the case for September 30.
The listening to got here simply days after US authorities arrested Guzman Lopez and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, a longtime member of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, within the El Paso, Texas space final week, in keeping with the US Division of Justice.
Lots of the particulars of the arrest operation stay murky, nevertheless.
Final week, US officers conversant in the state of affairs stated Guzman Lopez duped Zambada into boarding a propeller airplane in Mexico by saying they have been going to scope out actual property within the nation’s north.
As an alternative, the airplane introduced each males to the US, the place Guzman Lopez had deliberate to give up, however Zambada had not.
Zambada’s lawyer, Frank Perez, disputed the model of occasions supplied by US officers. Perez stated that Guzman Lopez “forcibly kidnapped” Zambada and introduced him to the US towards his will.
Zambada pleaded not responsible to drug expenses final week in El Paso federal court docket.
Mexico has opened an investigation into the occasions resulting in the 2 males’s arrest.
Their seize fuelled theories about how US authorities pulled it off and prompted Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to take the weird step of issuing a public enchantment to drug cartels to not struggle one another.
“Those that are engaged in these unlawful actions know they resolve nothing with confrontations,” Lopez Obrador stated on Monday, including “They might exit and danger the lives of different human beings, and why make households undergo?”
There have been no instant studies of elevated violence over the weekend.
However the Sinaloa cartel has been riven for years by preventing between followers of Zambada and rivals who observe El Chapo’s sons, identified collectively as Los Chapitos, or “The Little Chapos”.
Their father was convicted of drug expenses in New York in 2019 and is serving a life sentence in a most safety jail.
US Drug Enforcement Administration chief Anne Milgram stated Zambada’s arrest “strikes on the coronary heart of the cartel that’s accountable for almost all of medication, together with fentanyl and methamphetamine, killing Individuals from coast to coast”.
