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 News from Around the Americas | May 2007 
Mexico Asks FBI to Help Locate Suspect
 Marina Jiménez & Greg Mcarthur - globeandmail.com
| | Domenic and Nancy Ianiero were killed last year in a luxury hotel in Cancun. |
Mexican authorities say they have asked the FBI to locate a suspect in the slayings of Domenic and Nancy Ianiero, the Canadian couple killed last year in a luxury hotel in the Mayan Riviera, following revelations that the suspect is likely in California.
Mexico's international affairs agency has asked the FBI to locate Blas Delgado Fajardo, a former security guard who disappeared around the same time the couple's bodies were found, Bello Melchor Rodriguez y Carrillo, the prosecutor in charge of the unsolved slaying, said at a Cancun press conference on Friday.
The request follows an interview published last week in The Globe and Mail and Periodico QueQui, a Cancun newspaper, with Aurora Fajardo, the mother of Mr. Delgado. Ms. Fajardo urged her son to turn himself in and "face the consequences" and said Mr. Delgado is likely in Madera, Calif., where four of his nine siblings reside illegally.
Anthony Ianiero, the Ianieros's only son, and his lawyer Edward Greenspan, have insisted over the past year that the security guard is the prime suspect in the sensational, unsolved killings, alleging that Mr. Delgado ingratiated himself to the Woodbridge, Ont., couple by massaging Domenic's ailing foot, only to later return and slit their throats.
Mr. Ianiero and his lawyer have accused the authorities of overlooking evidence.
Instead, Mexican authorities have tried to pin the crime on a Canadian killer or killers in an effort to calm the fears of Canadian tourists that drive the economy, the pair has alleged.
At the press conference Mr. Rodriguez y Carrillo stuck firmly to his earlier assertions that the slayings were contract killings ordered by Canadians. He called the pursuit of the security guard, "part of another line of investigation."
Meanwhile, on Saturday at the 2007 Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Toronto, Anthony Ianiero appeared as part of a panel discussing what it's like to be covered in the media.
Mr. Ianiero described his relationship with the media over the last year as a roller-coaster ride - "from being helped to being destroyed and helped again."
Mr. Ianiero said his family came to rely on Canada's press in the early days of the investigation because neither the Mexican police nor the Canadian government was keeping them informed.
However, on the one-year anniversary of his parents' slayings, Mr. Ianiero said the media set back his efforts to find his parents' killer when The Globe and Mail published an article detailing how the Mexican authorities had deemed the dead couple's son as a "person of interest."
"At that point we felt we had moved so far forward, but on that day we took 10 steps back on everything we had tried to accomplish over the year - without being given the proper opportunity to know that this article was going to be printed, to know what it was about or to see if we had any comments about this, and it destroyed us because, of course, there's always stereotypical people out there who do believe that, because we're of Italian descent maybe they're in the Mafia," Mr. Ianiero said.
"So by helping people to believe this, it wasn't helping our cause and it wasn't helping the truth and we just think that at this point, we need the truth to be out to help us."
He also encouraged the media to hold government officials accountable and accused some within Canada's federal government of lying about his case - publicly saying they had contacted the Ianiero family when they had not.
"I think that the media should have jumped at things like that, just to show other Canadians that our situation was going on and that no one was helping us." |
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