Mexico takes down top Zetas leader

Just hours after authorities in Mexico said they had positively identified the body of the country's second-most-wanted drug suspect, who was gunned down over the weekend, a prosecutor on Tuesday announced that a group of armed men had stolen his corpse from a mortuary.

In a spectacular string of events, the top leader of the notorious Zetas drug cartel, Heriberto "El Lazca" Lazcano Lazcano, was killed in a confrontation with marine officers this weekend in the northeast state of Coahuila.

El Lazca, a former army corporal, who came from a poor family in Hidalgo state, joined the Gulf cartel as a hitman before breaking away to start his own drug organization.

According to a statement issued by the navy secretary, marines in the town of Progreso, Coahuila, on Saturday went to investigate citizen complaints of an armed group in the area. The navy opened fire on a vehicle on a highway south of Piedras Negras, near the Texas border, after a grenade was thrown from the car with two people inside.

The navy opened fire on a vehicle after a grenade was thrown from the car

Marine officials immediately suspected that one of the dead men was El Lazca, Mexico's most wanted drug trafficker after Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, head of the Sinaloa cartel. But they waited until DNA tests were conducted and fingerprints were taken from the body.

On Tuesday, Mexico's navy secretary released a photograph of El Lazca's dead body with information confirming that it was the ruthless Zeta leader. Then, hours later, Coahuila prosecutor Homero Romero said that an armed group had entered the García mortuary in Sabinas, taking the bodies of El Lazca and the other suspect shot dead, identified as Mario Alberto Ramos. Romero said that the authorities were investigating whether police or mortuary officials had participated in the body snatchings.

Initial reports of Lazca's death came on the same day government officials announced that the marines had arrested Salvador Alfonso Martínez, alias "La Ardilla" (the squirrel), a second-tier Zetas drug cartel leader, who is said to be responsible for the killing of 72 undocumented migrants in 2010 as well as the murders of more than 50 other people.

Martínez, who was arrested in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas state on Saturday, showed defiance and made obscene gestures as he was paraded before the press on Monday. The arrest came after a shootout between the navy and other suspected traffickers, the Mexican interior department said. Martínez was arrested along with five other men.

El Lazca," a former army corporal, joined the Gulf cartel as a hitman

Authorities said Martínez was also responsible for the killing of US citizen David Hartley on Falcon Lake, which straddles the US-Mexican border, while he was jet skiing in September 2010.

But the most notorious case was that of 72 undocumented workers, most of them from Central and South America, who were found executed near San Fernando. The cartel had reportedly offered to help the workers cross the border to the United States, but on the condition that they carried drugs. When they refused, they were lined up and shot dead.

But Lazca's death is another severe blow to the Zetas, which on September 27 saw the arrest of an internal rival leader Iván Velázquez, aka "El Talibán" or "Z-50," in central Mexico. El Lazca and El Talibán had been waging a brutal war for control of the Zetas since earlier this year.