Federal prosecutors in Connecticut say a state trooper, a police officer and three Transportation Security Administration officers based at airports have been arrested on charges of participating in a conspiracy to distribute tens of thousands of highly addictive painkiller pills.

Authorities say the TSA officers, based at airports in Florida and New York, a Westchester County, N.Y., police officer and a Florida state trooper received cash payments to help transport oxycodone pills from Florida to New York and Connecticut and/or transport cash proceeds from the sale of the drugs back to Florida.

Authorities plan to announce details of the arrests at a news conference in Stamford on Tuesday afternoon.

The top leader of the Zeta criminal organization was killed Friday in a Matamoros firefight with rivaling Gulf Cartel, sources close to the newspaper have reported.

Heriberto "El Lazca" Lazcano Lazcano was reportedly killed in a gun battle on the streets of Matamoros Friday afternoon.

Gunfire erupted shortly after 2 p.m., throughout the city as the two forces clashed. Sources claim Lazcano was killed at an area near Avenida Del Niño and Lauro Villar.

U.S. officials confirmed the firefight and said the international bridges in Brownsville remained opened Friday. They were on alert to any gunmen or Mexican residents attempting to flee the gunfire in Matamoros after a street battle broke out about a mile south of the Rio Grande, officials said.

A gunbattle between rival drug gangs in western Mexico left 29 bullet-ridden bodies in fake military uniforms heaped across a roadway and inside bullet-riddled vehicles in the Pacific coast state of Nayarit, the army said Thursday.

The bodies, all male, were found Wednesday scattered around 14 shot-up pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles, two of which had bulletproofing.

Television images of the scene near the town of Ruiz showed what appeared to have been a convoy of cartel vehicles that had been ambushed or engaged by another column of gunmen on a stretch of rural highway. Military-style boots, bulletproof vests, hand grenades and thousands of rounds of ammunition were also found at the scene.

The army said two suspects wounded in the battle were found at the scene, though there was no information on what gang they belonged to. Nayarit state police had originally said that officers responding to reports of a kidnapping found four wounded men at the scene of the shootout.

A member of the Tohono O'odham tribe, whose ancestral lands straddle the Arizona-Mexico border, is among tribe members from villages in Mexico who say they are being driven out by an influx of violent Mexican smugglers.

Tom Tancredo, a Republican congressman and presidential candidate, said Wednesday that the United States cannot trust the Mexican government in combating narcotics and called the neighbouring country a 'drug cartel.' 'Mexico is a drug cartel,' Tancredo sa

Among the many problems on the US-Mexico border is that of reported Mexican military incursions onto the US side of the border. These incidents raise disturbing questions about US-Mexican relations and the two nations' wars on the drug cartels. The eviden

Since 2005, federal and state law enforcement officials have known drug smugglers were using fake Texas Department of Transportation vehicles to haul their cargo all over the Lone Star State. But, more than two years later, and despite a major prosecution

Drug-gang violence that plagues Mexico is worsening and could spill over into the United States, according to a new report by a consultant on Gov. Rick Perry's Texas Border Security Council. While Mexican President Felipe Calderon has deployed as many as

Several airline employees and workers at Kennedy Airport were arrested yesterday on charges they were part of an international drug ring that brought hundreds of pounds of cocaine, heroin and other narcotics into the United States from the Dominican Repub

Border Patrol agents check all of the typical spots that drug smugglers use to take drugs into the United States, and they must look at another location over their heads. That's because drug smugglers in El Paso are using the underside of the bridges betw

Officials didn't have to look far to find the latest drug tunnel in Nogales — it was right under their feet. Leaving trickery and deception in their toolboxes, would-be drug smugglers opted for the straight-ahead dive this time, hand-digging a crude tun

Mexican drug cartels now operate in almost every region of the United States and bring in as much as $23 billion a year in revenue, according to a Government Accountability Office report that will be released Thursday.