Mexican woman freed by captors

By Leslie Berestein and Anna Cearley
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITERS

November 12, 2005

The kidnapping and extortion that until recently was associated with immigrant smugglers in Arizona is showing up in the San Diego-Tijuana region, federal immigration officials said Thursday.

Officials from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced the arrest of a Tijuana municipal police officer suspected in the kidnapping for ransom of a 26-year-old Mexican woman, who had hoped to be smuggled from Tijuana into the United States. An investigation into a possible extortion ring continues.

It is the second such case in a week. Nov. 3, San Diego police officers arrested two men after they attempted to extort money from the mother of a 15-year-old girl who was smuggled across the border.

Such cases are typical in the Phoenix area, where in the past two years, federal authorities have investigated at least 800 cases of smuggled migrants being held against their will for ransom.

"Whether this is spilling over to this side of the United States, time will tell," said Frank Marwood, acting deputy agent in charge of ICE in San Diego.

The tactics used in the latest case, which included threats of violence against the kidnapped woman, are similar to those used in Arizona, Marwood said. On Monday, the sister and brother-in-law of the kidnapped woman contacted authorities in Ventura County, where the family lives. They reported receiving a phone call from someone claiming the woman had been smuggled into San Diego, but would not be released until the family wired $3,200 to her captors via Western Union.

The Ventura County Sheriff's Department contacted the San Diego office of ICE, the branch of Homeland Security in charge of investigations. Mexican authorities also became involved in the investigation.

During the next two days, while no money was received, the calls to the family became increasingly hostile. They were told that if they didn't pay the ransom, the kidnapped woman would be forced into prostitution, then shot in the head.

As part of the investigation, the family agreed to wire money. Tuesday night around 7:30, federal agents conducting surveillance outside a money wiring service in San Ysidro apprehended the man, who according to Marwood carried evidence linking him with the extortion attempt.

The man indicated that the woman was being held in Tijuana, not in San Diego. More than a dozen Mexico city and state officers and federal intelligence officers searched for the woman, said Juan Dania, senior ICE agent at the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana.

About 9:30 p.m. Tuesday, Mexican authorities found the uninjured woman in Tijuana, after she had been released by her captors. She was escorted to the San Ysidro Port of Entry and paroled into the United States, where she will remain as a material witness.

The man arrested is Isaias Limon de la Rosa, 33, who U.S. immigration officials say is a veteran of the Tijuana police department. He crossed legally into San Ysidro with a border-crossing card. Yesterday, he was taken to Ventura County, where he will be held while awaiting trial on felony kidnapping and extortion charges.

According to Mexican officials, Limon began working for the Tijuana police in 1994, but he was sentenced or spent six months in prison because of a 1996 property damage complaint, according to police department personnel records.

He re-entered the police department, though he was under investigation recently for accumulating a suspiciously high number of days on medical leave, said the city's director of public security, Ernesto Santillana Santillana.

Santillana said his agency is cooperating with U.S. officials, and it has opened an investigation into whether other police officers were working with Limon, who was based at the city's La Presa Rural office.

Santillana said it was unclear if the woman's captors were involved in smuggling, or if she was kidnapped from her smugglers by another organization. He said the case has the earmarks of organized crime.

"It is certainly an organization, there is no doubt about that," Santillana said, adding that immigration officials have received reports of similar cases, though he wouldn't say where the reports came from.

He said, however, that immigration officials are not linking this case with last week's involving the minor, in which two men in their 20s were arrested by San Diego police officers and charged with false imprisonment.

A police department spokesman said the two suspects in that case are 27-year-old Jose Amparo Palomares and 21-year-old Manuel Amparo, both of whom were in the U.S. illegally. They have been charged with false imprisonment and are next due in court Tuesday.

Read the entire article from the San Diego Union Tribune here.