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2nd LD Writethru: Mexico approves extradition of druglord "El Chapo" Guzman to U.S.

Xinhua, May 21, 2016 Adjust font size:

Mexican druglord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman will be extradited to the United States, the Foreign Affairs Ministry announced on Friday.

The ministry said it has notified Guzman, who was recently moved to a prison close to the U.S. border, that it had approved an extradition request filed by a federal district court of Texas in the United States.

"Today, Mr. Joaquin Guzman Loera ... was notified of the agreements with which the Mexican government grants his international extradition to the government of the United States to be tried by the Federal District Court for the Western District of Texas," the ministry said.

Guzman was charged with "the crimes of criminal conspiracy, crimes against public health, organized crime, possession of arms, homicide and money laundering," according to the ministry.

Guzman has 30 days to appeal the decision, the ministry said. Also, the United States gave assurances that Guzman would not face the death penalty, a punishment that Mexico is against, it added.

In addition, the ministry said, the head of Mexico's powerful Sinaloa Cartel is wanted by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California on charges of importing, possessing and distributing cocaine.

In the pre-dawn hours of May 7, "El Chapo," or "Shorty," was suddenly moved under heavy guard from the maximum security Altiplano prison in central Mexico to a similar facility in Ciudad Juarez, a town in Mexico's northern state of Chihuahua that sits across the border from the U.S. city of El Paso, Texas.

The Ministry of the Interior (Segob) said at the time that the transfer was made "as part of a security strategy" that had rotated "more than 7,400 inmates around the country" to different prisons since September.

But local media suspected he was moved to the border area for his eventual extradition to the United States.

With Guzman in U.S. custody, Mexican officials would no longer have to worry about the drug capo attempting another embarrassing prison escape.

The trafficker first broke out of a maximum security Mexican prison in 2001. He was recaptured in 2014, but managed to escape again in 2015 from a different maximum security facility, through a tunnel that led from his cell's shower stall to a safe house more than a kilometer away. He was recaptured in January, 2016. Enditem