MEXICO CITY ? Police have arrested a U.S. man for smuggling American grenade parts into Mexico, where they were assembled for use by the Sinaloa drug cartel, prosecutors said Tuesday.
Mexico's Attorney General's Office identified the man as Jean Baptiste Kingery, but said he used several aliases. It said Kingery allegedly bought weapons parts and grenade casings in U.S. stores and even over the Internet, and smuggled them into Mexico through the border city of Mexicali.
The office said Kingery was arrested late last week in the Pacific Coast city of Mazatlan, in Sinaloa state, in a raid on a house where five guns were found. He is being held under a form of house arrest.
Police also raided five other homes, and found what appeared to have been facilities for assembling grenades, including gunpowder and grenade triggers, pins and caps.
In April, two men were arrested with 192 grenade casings in Baja California, the state where Mexicali is located. They told police they were part of the grenade smuggling ring, and that led to the detention of another American man, who led police to Kingery, prosecutors said.
The U.S. Embassy in Mexico City would not confirm the man's name, hometown or nationality, citing privacy concerns.
Mexican drug cartels have frequently used hand grenades in battles with police and soldiers, and occasionally against civilians.
On Aug. 14, gunmen tossed a grenade onto a busy tourist boulevard in the Gulf Coast city of Veracruz, killing a man and seriously wounding his wife and their two young children.
The Attorney General's Office said Kingery had been the subject of "a bilateral investigation ... with the U.S. government and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives."
But the ATF refused to comment on a Wall Street Journal report that Kingery had been detained in Arizona in June 2010 and then released, purportedly because officials wanted to use him as an informant or in a sting operation.
ATF spokesman Drew Wade said "we can't confirm or deny the existence of an ongoing criminal investigation."
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