Hourly Update

Mexican police: Border terrorism fears overblown

MEXICO CITY - The new head of Mexico's federal police force said Monday he doesn't see the U.S.-Mexico border as a terror target and that while terrorists may try to use this country to sneak into America, there's no evidence they have yet done so. Speaking at a news conference eight days after he took the reins of the country's largest federal police force, Adm. Jose Luis Figueroa said anti-terrorism efforts were his highest priority. And although he remarked that "at any moment terrorists could use Mexico as a passage to the United States," he said recent jitters sweeping the U.S.-Mexico border were unfounded. "Up until now, we have not detected one terrorist in this country," he said, later adding, "I don't think the border is a place, a target, for fundamentalist Islam movements." Figueroa said nothing came of two recent terrorism scares, one involving two Jordanian nationals arrested in Central America, and another of a woman who crossed from Mexico into Texas with a South African passport that had been altered. In September, Costa Rica deported two men who tried to enter the country with false, but well-crafted European travel documents. The pair bounced around Central America and spent some time in Mexico before finally being sent back to Jordan in an incident that sparked investigations throughout the region. The other case Figueroa referred to took place in July, when a South African woman was arrested at the international airport in the border city of McAllen, Texas, after trying to board a plane to New York with a passport that had been tampered with. The suspect flew from London to Mexico, where she was admitted without incident, then apparently slipped across the Rio Grande into Texas. "In these cases, there haven't been proven links to al-Qaida," Figueroa said.