Igor Labastida Calderón, who oversaw a division that monitors smuggling, had stopped for a bite with three bodyguards and an aide, a police spokesman, Eduardo Caño, said at a news conference.
The U.S. Border Patrol deploys them to monitor smuggling activities.
The authorities said they had incinerated more than four and a half tons of endangered pangolins and monitor lizards smuggled to Hanoi over the last two months after the animals failed to adapt to their new habitat.
Mansour and others monitoring the increasingly lucrative smuggling business fear that it may morph, as did the smuggling routes in Sinai in 2009, into trafficking and extortion of the most vulnerable migrants.
The airstrip that I used when I visited the Nuba Mountains has now been bombed to keep humanitarians from flying in relief supplies; the markets I visited are now deserted, according to accounts smuggled out to monitoring groups.
So there are two distinct sets of goals at work, here: 1) to end the rocket attacks and weapons smuggling and bring international monitors and the PA into the process of monitoring truce terms; and 2) to bring down Hamas and strengthen the PA and "pragmatic" elements in Arab states everywhere.
Traffic - an organisation that monitors and tries to prevent the smuggling of endangered species - welcomed the fact that China's authorities had reacted swiftly to rescue the animals but said much more needs to be done to prevent similar cases.
Now, UNESCO has established an observatory in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, to monitor and try to stop the smuggling of Syrian artefacts into neighbouring countries.
The goal of truce terms that would put an end to weapons smuggling and involve international monitors, accompanied by the promise of a lifting of the siege of Ghetto Gaza, was one that aroused considerable support within the Arab world.
Thus at the end of the second or even the third day of air strikes, had Israel pulled back it would have seemed to be in an excellent position to seek truce terms more to its liking, with Arab support for international monitors and an end to weapons smuggling and an increased role for the PA at the crossings.
