Suspect Arrested in Murder Case At Center of ‘Fast and Furious’ Scandal

Fox News reported on Wednesday that a suspect in the murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, who was killed by one of the guns smuggled to Mexico as part of the Fast and Furious scandal, was arrested south of the border.

The report details how Heraclio Osorio-Arellanes was found by a joint team of American and Mexican law enforcement officers. The drug cartel member allegedly used a gun from the ATF operation, where the federal agency “allowed criminals to buy guns in Phoenix-area shops with the intention of tracking them once they made their way into Mexico.” However, the ATF lost track of over 70 percent of the guns.

Fox News pointed out in their write-up that Terry was “killed on Dec. 14, 2010 in a gunfight between Border Patrol agents and members of a five-man cartel ‘rip crew,’ which regularly patrolled the desert along the U.S.-Mexico border looking for drug dealers to rob.” Two of the guns found at the scene came from the Fast and Furious operation.

As Fox’s report notes, the federal government had offered a $250,000 reward for “information leading to the arrest of Osorio-Arellanes, who was captured at a ranch on the border of the Mexican states of Sinaloa and Chihuahua.” Four other members of the rip crew have already received sentences, with two back in October 2015 being convicted of murder charges.

On Wednesday, The Arizona Republic filed their own article on Osorio-Arellanes’s arrest, confirming the news with U.S. Marshal David Gonzales. Gonzales also stated that “the extradition process kicks into effect now, and we’ll be coordinating with the Mexican government to have him extradited to the U.S. as soon as possible.”

[image via screengrab]