Suspect held in agent’s slaying

PHOENIX — A Mexican fugitive accused of pulling the trigger to kill a U.S. Border Patrol agent was captured more than six years after a slaying that exposed a bungled gun-tracking operation by the federal government.

Mexican authorities arrested Heraclio Osorio-Arellanes on Wednesday as the U.S. government has pushed hard to prosecute the suspected marijuana bandits involved in the 2010 death of 40-year-old Brian Terry.

His December 2010 killing uncovered the Fast and Furious operation, in which agents from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed criminals to buy guns with the intention of tracking them to criminal organizations.

But the agency lost most of the guns, including two that were found at the scene of Terry’s death. The operation set off a political backlash for the Obama administration and led Terry’s family to sue.

Mexican marines took Osorio-Arellanes into custody near the border between the states of Sinaloa and Chihuahua — a mountainous region noted for drug activity, according to a joint statement Thursday from Mexico’s navy and its federal attorney general’s office. He was being held pending extradition proceedings.

Terry was part of a four-man team in an elite Border Patrol unit staking out the southern Arizona desert on a mission to find “rip-off ” crew members who rob drug smugglers. They encountered a group and identified themselves as police in trying to arrest them.