A picture of former Canadian Olympic snowboarder Ryan Wedding ceremony, who was a fugitive and had been charged with allegedly operating and taking part in a transnational drug trafficking operation, is displayed on a video monitor together with bricks of cocaine, foreground, throughout an October 2024 information convention on the FBI workplaces in Los Angeles.
Damian Dovarganes/AP
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Damian Dovarganes/AP
WASHINGTON — Ryan Wedding ceremony, a former Olympic snowboarder from Canada who was among the many FBI’s prime fugitives and faces prices associated to multinational drug trafficking and the killing of a federal witness, has been arrested in Mexico, prime Justice Division officers stated Friday.
Wedding ceremony, 44, is accused of operating a drug trafficking operation, and officers say he orchestrated a number of killings to additional the drug crimes. He was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wished Fugitives checklist, and authorities had supplied a $15 million reward for data resulting in his arrest and conviction.
U.S. Legal professional Common Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed Wedding ceremony’s arrest in social media posts. Patel stated Wedding ceremony was being transported to the U.S. after being apprehended Thursday evening in Mexico, the place U.S. authorities imagine the previous Olympian been hiding for greater than a decade.
“This is a huge day for a safer North America, and the world,” Patel wrote on the social platform X, “and a message that those who break our laws and harm our citizens will be brought to justice.”
Patel was anticipated to carry a information convention later Friday in California.
Patel held conferences in Mexico on Thursday and left Friday with two detainees, Mexico’s Safety Secretary Omar García Harfuch wrote on X. He stated the 2 detainees have been a Canadian citizen who turned himself in on the U.S. embassy, in addition to another person who was among the many FBI’s most-wanted and had been detained by Mexican authorities.
A member of Mexico’s Safety Cupboard, who spoke on situation of anonymity as a result of they weren’t licensed to talk publicly, informed The Related Press that Wedding ceremony was the Canadian citizen who turned himself in.
Wedding ceremony competed for his residence nation within the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake Metropolis. Olympic information present he participated in a single males’s snowboarding occasion, parallel big slalom, ending twenty fourth.
Wedding ceremony was charged in 2024 with operating a drug ring that used semitrucks to maneuver cocaine between Colombia, Mexico, Southern California and Canada. Authorities stated his aliases included “El Jefe,” “Public Enemy” and “James Conrad Kin.”
In November, U.S. Legal professional Common Pam Bondi introduced that he had additionally been indicted on prices of orchestrating the killing of a witness in Colombia to assist him keep away from extradition to the U.S.
Authorities stated Wedding ceremony and co-conspirators used a Canadian web site referred to as “The Dirty News” to publish {a photograph} of the witness so he might be recognized and killed. The witness was then adopted to a restaurant in Medellín in January and shot within the head.
Wedding ceremony faces separate drug trafficking prices in Canada that date again to 2015, in accordance with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Wedding ceremony was beforehand convicted within the U.S. of conspiracy to distribute cocaine and was sentenced to jail in 2010, federal information present. Federal prosecutors in 2024 stated they believed Wedding ceremony, after his launch from jail, had resumed drug trafficking beneath the safety of the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico.
