Reuters: U.S.: Lawyer hopes Arizona mother in Mexico drug bust may soon be freed

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Lawyer hopes Arizona mother in Mexico drug bust may soon be freed May 31st 2013, 03:07 By Tim Gaynor PHOENIX | Thu May 30, 2013 11:07pm EDT PHOENIX (Reuters) - The attorney for an Arizona mother jailed in Mexico after marijuana was found under her bus seat said on Thursday that video evidence showed she had boarded the vehicle without the drugs and expressed the hope she could be freed by the weekend. Yanira Maldonado, a Mormon and the mother of seven children, was arrested on May 22 after Mexican soldiers searched a bus on which she was traveling with her husband, Gary, and discovered some 12 pounds (5 kilograms) of marijuana under her seat. Attorney Jose Francisco Benitez said a security video from the bus terminal in Los Mochis in northwest Sinaloa state where the couple boarded the bus, showed Maldonado carrying only two blankets, water bottles and her purse. "The accusation is very weak and got weaker today with the video showing them arriving at the bus," Benitez told Reuters. "You can clearly see on the video that she did not at any moment have drugs." Benitez said a Mexican judge weighing the evidence has until 6:30 p.m. local time (9:30 p.m. EDT) on Friday to either charge Maldonado with a crime or release her. Asked if he was optimistic that she would be released, he said: "Yes." Maldonado's case has drawn attention on U.S. cable television, where it is portrayed as tale of a church-going mother from the Phoenix valley caught up in the world of Mexican drug cartels. Maldonado, who was born in Mexico and is a naturalized U.S. citizen, traveled to Mexico with her husband to attend a relative's funeral. The couple opted to take a bus back to Arizona as they believed it was safer than traveling by car The bus was pulled over at a military checkpoint about 80 miles south of the Arizona border, where it was searched and the marijuana packages were found, Benitez said. Maldonado has protested her innocence in television interviews from the prison in the Mexican border city of Nogales where she has been held since last week. "It's a lie what they are saying. They say they found something under my seat, but I never signed anything, they didn't show me anything," Maldonado told CNN. "I'm not a criminal ... this is not right, I need to be back with my family, I need to be out of here, I need help." Her plight has been taken up by U.S. Senator Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican, who contacted the Maldonado family, as well as officials in Mexico and the United States, his office said. The saga has also drawn attention to the murky world of drug traffickers who grow marijuana in the rugged heartlands of northwest Mexico and transport it across the Arizona border to satisfy strong demand from U.S. consumers. (Additional reporting by Lizbeth Diaz in Mexico City; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Christopher Wilson) Link this Share this Digg this Email Reprints

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