MEXICO CITY, Oct 21, (AP): Police, prosecutors and forensic examiners in the northern Mexico state of Sinaloa all conspired to cover up the killing of an opponent of the ruling-party state governor, using a blood-stained truck found at the crime scene, federal prosecutors said Sunday. The bombshell statement by federal prosecutors backs up the version of imprisoned drug lord Ismael "El Mayo” Zambada. Zambada claims he was forced aboard an airplane on July 25 by another drug capo who flew them both to the United States and turned them in to US authorities.

Zambada said in a letter in August that Héctor Cuén, an opponent of ruling-party Gov Ruben Rocha, was murdered on July 25 at the same time and the same ranch where Zambada was kidnapped. Federal prosecutors revealed Sunday that Cuén’s blood was indeed found at the ranch. Gov Rocha has not responded publicly to Sunday’s statement by prosecutors, but he has said in the past that Cuén was killed by gunmen in a random botched robbery at a gasoline station miles away later that day, and Sinaloa state prosecutors showed security camera footage of the alleged attack.

But federal prosecutors quickly noted something was wrong with that video: post-mortem records showed Cuén’s body had four gunshot wounds, while only one gunshot can be heard on the security camera footage, and gas station employees said they didn’t hear any. Cuén's bullet-ridden body could not help solve the riddle, because Sinaloa officials violated all murder investigation rules by allowing the body to be cremated almost immediately.

The gasoline station footage was later proved to be a falsification, but something about the white pickup truck seen in the footage was real: it had the blood of one of Zambada's trusted bodyguards in the cargo bed. That implied that Sinaloa state police, crime scene investigators and prosecutors either found the bodyguard's corpse in the truck and got rid of the body, or at very least took the blood-stained vehicle from a crime scene to fake a gunpoint robbery at the gas station.