Gang leader’s intentions probed

U.S. intelligence authorities were trying to determine yesterday what the suspected leader of a deadly Honduran terrorist gang blamed for the massacre of 28 persons in a December bus attack was planning to do in the United States.

Ebner Anibal Rivera Paz, 29, known throughout Central America as “El Culiche” — the Tapeworm — was arrested with 12 other illegal aliens near Falfurrias, Texas, by a state highway patrolman Feb. 10.

Rivera Paz, who authorities in the United States and Honduras say is the head of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, remained in custody in a federal detention center in southern Texas yesterday.

Roy Cervantes, spokesman for the U.S. Border Patrol’s McAllen Sector, said federal agencies were exchanging information on the violent group, also known by the initials MS-13.

No charges have been filed. Mr. Cervantes said the government would present a case to a McAllen grand jury next month.

Dan Ochoa, with the anti-gang unit of the Edinburg Police Department in Texas, said several other members of the gang had been arrested in the Rio Grande Valley and that the group was a “growing threat.”

“It’s increased slowly,” Mr. Ochoa said. “We barely started to hear about these gang members about a year ago.”

Some Mexican news reports yesterday said the Honduran gang had ties to al Qaeda.

The Washington Times reported in September that U.S. officials were concerned the gang might help sneak al Qaeda terrorists into the country, citing meetings in Honduras between MS-13 members and Adnan G. El Shukrijumah, a key al Qaeda cell leader with a multimillion-dollar reward on his head.

The Border Patrol yesterday downplayed suspicions of al Qaeda ties.

“The information we have doesn’t indicate that,” Mr. Cervantes said, but “we will keep talking to him, and others.”

The arrest was not announced until Wednesday, one official said, because some government agents thought a second group soon might be following. U.S. agents had been tipped by Border Patrol operatives in Honduras that Rivera Paz might be headed for the United States.

Rivera Paz, who was traveling under the name Franklin Jairo Rivera-Hernandez, was tripped up by an alert U.S. Border Patrol processing agent who noted several tattoos on his torso — emblems of membership in MS-13.

The rebel leader had escaped Jan. 23 from a Honduran prison, where he had been awaiting trial for the Dec. 23 bus attack.

The arrest of Rivera Paz was greeted with exultation in Honduras and in nearby El Salvador, where U.S. and other Central American law-enforcement officials were meeting to formulate plans to rein in the Mara Salvatrucha gang.

Honduran Security Minister Oscar Alvarez praised the capture, saying in Tegucigalpa that Rivera Paz and his followers were “capable of committing any kind of cold-blooded crime.”

The ambush of a bus loaded with Christmas shoppers and workers returning home in the town of San Pedro Sula in northern Honduras was the most horrendous of several attacks committed by MS-13.

Two men reportedly forced the bus off the road, jumped out of their cars and began spraying the bus with bullets. Hacking deaths, beheadings and bombings across Central America also have been linked to the group.

The U.S. Justice Department says as many as 10,000 members of MS-13 may be in the United States. Intelligence officers in Houston and San Antonio, as well as throughout the Rio Grande Valley, say elements of the gang are emerging slowly.

MS-13 was said to have originated in the mid-1980s by illegal immigrant gang members in the Los Angeles area who had been deported to their homelands.

Rivera Paz has entered the United States illegally several times, U.S. officials say, and has used dozens of aliases. He had been deported four times — the last time in August 2001 from Los Angeles.