American and Mexican authorities have arrested the man believed to be responsible for the nonfatal shooting of an American consular official in the western city of Guadalajara.

“The detention of the aggressor against the consular agent has been achieved,” said Eduardo Almaguer, attorney general in the state of Jalisco, where Guadalajara is located, on Sunday morning. “The suspect has been handed over to Mexico’s federal attorney general’s office.”

The federal attorney general’s office announced on Sunday evening that the alleged perpetrator of this “sly and cowardly attack” was a US citizen who “will be expelled and repatriated in the United States of America where his judicial situation will be determined.”

In a statement, US secretary of state John Kerry thanked the Mexican authorities “for their swift and decisive arrest of a suspect in the heinous attack against our foreign service officer colleague”.

“The safety and security of US citizens and our diplomatic staff overseas are among our highest priorities,” Kerry said. “My thoughts and prayers remain with this officer and his family during this difficult time. I wish him a speedy recovery.”

Neither Almaguer nor Kerry provided any further details but a source within the Guadalajara police force, who spoke on condition of anonymity, identified the suspect as Zafar Zia, a 31-year-old US citizen of Indian origin.

The source said Zia was captured in a joint operation by the FBI, DEA and Jalisco state officials in Guadalajara’s affluent Providencia neighbourhood early on Sunday morning. The suspect had a .380 caliber pistol tucked into his waistband when he was arrested. The authorities also seized a Honda Accord with California license plates, a wig and sunglasses that may match those seen in footage of the shooting, and 16 ziplock bags containing 336 grams of a substance believed to be marijuana.

Hours after the shooting on Friday night, the US consulate in Guadalajara posted video footage and still images of the suspect from CCTV cameras. The FBI offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the identification of the shooter.



The consulate declined to name the victim due to “privacy considerations” but local police sources identified him as Christopher Ashcraft, a foreign service officer at the state department who had been stationed in Guadalajara since June 2015.

A friend of Ashcraft, who was shot once in the chest as he was leaving a local gym, told the Washington Post that he was recovering well at a hospital in Guadalajara and planned to return to the US for a time. Ashcraft “had no idea what happened”, the friend said, but thought that the shooting “wasn’t random”.

There has been no indication as to the motive for the shooting, but Guadalajara is a known bastion of the Jalisco New Generation cartel, one of Mexico’s most powerful and violent drug gangs. The cartel has been blamed for the assassination of dozens of Mexican officials and police officers in recent years but direct attacks on US officials are less common.



Alejandro Hope, a Mexican security analyst and former intelligence officer, said Mexican cartels rarely contract foreigners to carry out killings and generally avoid “self-defeating” attacks on US officials that provoke strong international pressure.

“It doesn’t appear to have been a robbery or an attempted kidnapping. It’s not clear whether organised crime was involved,” he added. “It’s a very strange case.”

In the wake of the shooting, the US embassy in Mexico issued the following advice: “US citizens in the Guadalajara area are urged to restrict their movements outside their homes and places of work to those truly essential. They should also take care not to fall into predictable patterns for those movements that are essential. They should vary the times and routes of their movements.”