Month: June 2020

The federal Attorney General’s Office said it would take over the investigation into the killing, but did not offer details of the deaths of District Court Judge Uriel Villegas Ortiz and his wife, Verónica Barajas.

While judges are believed to be frequently pressured by organized crime in Mexico and lawyers involved in drug cases have been killed in the past, killings of federal judges are extremely rare.

In 2006, a federal judge was shot to death while traveling in his car near a maximum-security prison outside Mexico City that holds some of Mexico’s top drug suspects.

A federal judge and his wife have been slain in the western Mexico state of Colima, Supreme Court Chief Justice Arturo Zaldívar announced Tuesday after interrupting a court session to break the news.