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Summary Prosecutors said they broke up plots to extract Gadhafis son from Libya and bring him to Mexico.
Prosecutors said Wednesday they broke up not one, but two Indiana Jones-style plots to extract the son of late dictator Moammar Gadhafi from Libya and bring him to Mexico as his fathers regime crumbled.The plan to sneak out al-Saadi Gadhafi involved piles of stolen passports, white-knuckle flights with pilots who refused to land in war-torn Libya and luxury homes bought under false names in Mexico, according to Assistant Attorney General Jose Cuitlahuac Salinas.He said it was led by a Canadian woman, a Danish man and two Mexican suspects who were charged this week with attempted immigrant trafficking, falsifying documents and organized crime.Salinas said the group hired pilots to fly from Mexico to Kosovo, from there to the Tunisian capital of Tunis and on to Libya in July, but that attempt failed to extract the dictators son.They werent able to do it out because the pilots refused to carry out a secret landing, Salinas said.The ring, purportedly led by Canadian Cynthia Vanier, then allegedly made arrangements for a second attempt, hiring pilots and a plane. But Mexican authorities were tipped off to the scheme by a series of anonymous e-mails and arrested the four suspects in November, before the second flight could take off.Prosecutors showed an image of the Guy Fawkes mask in connection with the tip. The image of Fawkes, a 17th century English revolutionary, has become a symbol of the Internet network Anonymous, which has claimed credit for internet hacking around the world.Because the suspects had not been ordered held over for trial, they have not entered pleas, nor do they have lawyers of record.In December, a lawyer for al-Saadi Gadhafi vigorously denied that his client plotted to sneak illegally into Mexico.A Twitter account linked to the Anonymous IberoAmerica website, which has carried comments from the movement in Mexico in the past, did not immediately respond to queries about whether the Anonymous movement was responsible for blowing the whistle on the plot.
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