Theft of body led Mexico to identify slain drug lord

Red-faced Mexican officials admitted Wednesday they did not realize they had killed Mexico's second most-wanted man until after his body was stolen from a funeral parlor. Mexico's navy said in a statement Monday that it had killed a person whom it believed to be Heriberto Lazcano, the leader of the feared Zetas cartel, which has been implicated in a string of mass killings in recent years. What officials did not reveal until pressed by journalists Wednesday is that they were not aware that the corpse in their possession was Lazcano's until after a gang of heavily-armed, masked men stormed into the funeral parlor and took the body. "The removal of the body was what put a spotlight" on the identity of the slain man, Vice Admiral Jose Luis Vergara, a spokesman for Mexico's navy secretariat, told a Mexican television network. "We figured we had to be dealing with a very important person" if armed men were dispatched to retrieve the corpse, the military spokesman said in an interview with the station Televisa. Lazcano was killed during a shootout Sunday in Coahuila, one of the border states at the epicenter of Mexico's vicious drug war, which officials say has claimed 60,000 lives since the launch of a military crackdown in 2006. Lazcano, described as ruthless and ambitious, was gunned down by naval special forces near a baseball field in the town of Progreso. His body and that of another man were then released to the local authorities and taken to a funeral home in nearby Sabinas. Announcing Lazcano's probable slaying, officials initially failed to disclose that the drug capon's body had been snatched, saying only that they were awaiting the results of forensic tests to know it was him for sure. Only on Tuesday did they reveal, with considerable embarrassment, that gunmen had stolen the bodies from the funeral parlor and driven them away in a hearse. President Felipe Calderon on Tuesday praised the killing of Lazcano, calling him "one of the biggest and most dangerous" drug lords in Mexico. The Zetas are one of Mexico's most powerful drug gangs alongside the Pacific region's Sinaloa federation, led by fugitive billionaire Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman. Lazcano had a $2.6 million bounty on his head in Mexico and another reward offered by the United States for $5 million.e