Ciudad Juarez, Mexico – An Egyptian man who was convicted of rape and murder and once was the primary suspect in a string of slayings of young women in this big border city, died Thursday of a heart attack, authorities said.
Abdel Latif Sharif, 59, was serving a 30-year sentence for the 1995 rape and strangulation of 17-year-old student Elizabeth Castro Garcia.
On Wednesday, Sharif was transferred from the Aquiles Serdan prison in Chihuahua City, 250 miles (400 kilometers) south of Ciudad Juarez, to a clinic to be treated for an internal hemorrhage. He died hours later of a heart attack, said Marco Antonio Moreno, a spokesman with Chihuahua state police.
Investigators say more than 350 women have been slain in Ciudad Juarez since 1993. About 100 killings followed a pattern in which young women were sexually assaulted, strangled and dumped in the desert.
Authorities said Sharif was responsible for the deaths of several young women in Ciudad Juarez, a city of 1.3 million people across from El Paso, Texas, and alleged he paid as many as 10 other men to commit copycat murders to draw suspicion away from him.
Investigators never proved the allegations, however, and Sharif was convicted only in Garcia’s killing.
Sharif denied involvement in both Garcia’s death and in the string of other murders. He recently had filed an appeal to his sentence, Moreno said.
Many relatives of the victims, who have formed various pressure groups to look for justice, doubted Sharif’s guilt suggesting he could have been a scapegoat. The killings of women carried on long after Sharif’s 1995 arrest.
Furthermore, federal authorities found that state police had botched some of the investigations into the killings so badly, damaging and losing evidence, that the truth around them may never known.
“Disgracefully, we will never know if Sharif was really guilty of the killings or not,” said Marisela Ortiz, head of Bring Our Daughters Home, a group of victims’ relatives.
