Report: Mexico cop in torture case fired

Carlos Tornero, police chief in the central city of Leon, was fired at the recommendation of the Guanajuato state attorney general's office for human rights, the Reforma newspaper said, citing state Public Safety Secretary Alvar Cabeza de Vaca.

The head of police training, Javier Haro Esparza, was also fired, the newspaper said.

No one was available to confirm the report at Cabeza de Vaca's office on Friday night, and officials from Guanajuato's state government could not be reached for comment.

One of the videos, obtained two weeks ago by the newspaper El Heraldo de Leon, shows police appearing to squirt water up a man's nose, a torture technique once notorious among Mexican police. They then dunk his head in a hole that an unidentified voice on the video says is full of excrement and rats. In another video, an unidentified English-speaking trainer asks a police agent to roll in his own vomit.

The English-speaking man belonged to a private U.S. security company hired to help train the agents, ex-police chief Tornero had said. He claimed the videos showed sessions training officers from an elite police unit to withstand torture if they are kidnapped by organized crime groups.

The footage provoked an uproar across Mexico amid separate accusations of abuse by police and soldiers engaged in a nationwide battle to root out drug gangs.

The National Human Rights Commission has documented 634 cases of military abuse since President Felipe Calderon sent more than 20,000 soldiers to assist in the crackdown.