MYSTERY LINGERS IN STRANGE DEATH OF MEXICAN DRUG LORD.

Byline: Sam Dillon The New York Times

Four months after Mexico's most influential drug trafficker was reported dead after plastic surgery, Mexicans have continued to puzzle over the mysteries of his passing.

Is the billionaire trafficker, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, really dead? And if so, was his death homicide or happenstance? And what became of the surgeons who pored over him for eight hours to streamline his nose, embolden his chin, flatten his midriff?

On Thursday, Mariano Herran Salvatti, the head of Mexico's anti-drug agency, offered the first official answers to the last questions, announcing that three surgeons who had operated on the trafficker in a Mexico City clinic July 3 had been charged with murder.

But of the three physicians - Jaime Godoy Singh, Ricardo Reyes Rincon and Carlos Avila Melgem - two have already received a brutal punishment, according to authorities in Guerrero state: forensic doctors there have identified two of the three mutilated bodies found Sunday in sealed drums along a roadside as Godoy and Reyes.

The corpses, partly encased in cement, were blindfolded and handcuffed, and had been burned, battered and strangled, said Benyehuda Martinez, one of the forensic scientists.

Herran did not describe why the three surgeons had been charged with murder. According to the official version, the trafficker died in a recovery room hours after his surgery; he had been given anesthetics and the sleeping potion Dormicum, a mixture that Herran said ``contradicted all medical science.''

``We have concluded that, acting with malice and with the intention of taking his life, these physicians applied a combination of medicines that resulted in the death of the trafficker,'' Herran said.

Throughout this decade, Carrillo Fuentes had enjoyed extraordinary license, moving hundreds of tons of Colombian cocaine through Mexico into the United States. But for reasons that remain unclear, he lost his influence with Mexico's security forces starting late last year. In January, he barely escaped a raid by army troops on the wedding party of his sister in Sinaloa state.

In February, Carrillo Fuentes visited Cuba and Chile, where he made investments aimed at establishing a residence.

Chilean authorities have said the trafficker considered undergoing plastic surgery in Cuba.

Instead, however, Rincon returned to Mexico and arranged with Dr. Ramon Lopez Salcedo, a medical school classmate, to carry out the surgery at the Mexico City clinic. The trafficker was registered at the clinic under an assumed name. Rincon arranged for Godoy, another graduate from Guadalajara, to work on the trafficker's nose, and Avila, still another Guadalajara classmate, to carry out the other facial surgery and radical liposuction.