The Mexico City judge who freed five suspects in the slaying of an American businessman further fanned the controversy Tuesday by suggesting that the killer was a member of the victim’s New York-based company.
Mexican authorities, meanwhile, reportedly were trying to re-arrest the suspects while they appeal the judge’s ruling.
During a news conference in her office, Judge Maria Claudia Campuzano defended her ruling, which has caused an international furor and prompted a formal U.S. protest.
The ruling also has angered Mexico City prosecutors and scores of Mexicans, who have voiced their concern about the nation’s criminal-justice system on radio call-in shows.
Campuzano said Tuesday that she went by the book when she set free, without trial, the men investigators said confessed to last month’s fatal shooting of 40-year-old John Peter Zarate. She let them go, she said, because of a lack of evidence.
“The judge has to make sure there is some equilibrium between the accuser and the accused,” she said.
Zarate, a California native who worked for the real estate firm of Cushman and Wakefield, was fatally shot Dec. 15 just blocks away from his suburban home by gunmen who had abducted him outside his downtown office.
The judge said that the evidence did not support murder charges, noting that each suspect told a different story about what happened that evening and that they complained of being tortured by police investigators.
During the 40-minute interview, Campuzano reiterated what she said when she released the suspects Friday, that the victim’s wife and a friend of Zarate lied to investigators during the investigation.
The judge also said she wondered why motives other than robbery were not pursued. Investigators, for example, never asked whether Zarate had “enemies within the company,” she said.
The judge’s comments dumbfounded U.S. officials and angered Arthur J. Mirante, chief executive officer of the New York-based real estate firm that Zarate worked for.
“The suggestion that Peter’s wife perjured herself is just ridiculous,” he said. “The suggestion that he had enemies within the company is totally manufactured. It’s ludicrous.”
He said Zarate’s widow, Robin, had cooperated with investigators. If she did not answer some questions from Mexican investigators, he said, it was because she was in shock and because she speaks little Spanish.
According to Mexican prosecutors, Campuzano criticized Robin Zarate for not responding to investigators’ questions when they called her minutes after her husband’s death.
Mexican prosecutors have said they plan to continue the murder investigation and will present further evidence to Campuzano. They also have said that they plan to investigate the judge.
Campuzano, 41, said she was not concerned about the investigation and did not understand why the case had caused such a stir.
However, she does have one regret, saying that when she released the suspects, she should not have referred to the ring leader as a “modern Robin Hood.”
She said that the use of the term was meant as a “metaphor” because the man said he would often take money from his pocket to guarantee that his accomplices shared equally in their ill-gotten gains.
“I wish I would have used a Mexican character,” she said. “It would have sounded better in Spanish.”
