MEXICO CITY - Dr. Felix Perez Rocha, a plastic surgeon, had finished a liposuction and was starting another procedure when gunmen burst into his operating room and hauled the terrified doctor away.
Thursday's kidnapping at a high-end clinic in the affluent business hub of Monterrey, Mexico, suggested one of the more cinematic chapters of drug-trafficking lore. A narco kingpin forcing a surgeon to alter his looks and help him evade the law? It has happened before.
But on Friday, state prosecutors in Monterrey said it appeared Perez's patient was the target, not the doctor, who is now safe.
A woman whom authorities identified as Elida Ordaz, 29, a U.S. citizen of Mission, Texas, had undergone a fat-removal procedure an hour or so before the four gunmen stormed the hospital. They demanded that she be turned over to them. When hospital officials refused - she had already left - they seized the doctor.
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"We understand that the principal objective … was the lady," said state Attorney General Alejandro Garza.
It was not clear why they were after her, but she is now under police protection, Garza said. Traffickers' henchmen often grab the relatives of their rivals, or sequester a woman who catches the boss's fancy.
Perez, abducted about 1:30 p.m. Thursday, was released later that night and has left the country.
Monterrey was until recently one of Mexico's safest cities. But paramilitary-style Zeta gang members are battling their onetime ally, the Gulf Cartel, for control, plunging the city's center into chaos.
Friday marked the end to another bloody week, including the killing of three people in a funeral home in Ciudad Juarez. Nine people were killed elsewhere in the same Chihuahua state, including four tied to a fence; and the nephew of a prominent politician was murdered, also in Ciudad Juarez.
Mexican authorities said Friday that police in Ciudad Juarez captured five alleged drug gang members suspected in the killings of two federal officers, including one whose bodies was hacked to pieces. One of the suspects is also believed to have acted as a lookout in the July 15 car-bomb attack on police that killed an officer and two other people.
