▲ Ryan Wedding’s arrival at Ontario International Airport, California. Image taken from a video.Photo Ap
Gustavo Castillo García
La Jornada Newspaper
Saturday, January 24, 2026, p. 3
The visit to Mexico by Kash Patel, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), in which he met with senior officials of the Mexican government to discuss security issues, became an operation to transport two of the 10 most wanted fugitives in that country, one of them, the former Olympic athlete Ryan James Wedding, thorof Canadian nationality, who – according to official information – “voluntarily surrendered to the US embassy.”
Likewise, Alejandro Rosales Castillo, detained on January 17 based on an arrest warrant for extradition purposes and who had been placed at the disposal of the Attorney General’s Office (FGR), was transferred to the United States. The agency has not released details of the legal status under which it was handed over to the director of the FBI, since it had to be placed at the disposal of a judge.
In the case of Wedding, he is identified “as the leader of an international organization dedicated to drug trafficking,” the security cabinet said.
Likewise, the director of the FBI published on his X account that the former athlete was allegedly “hiding in Mexico for more than a decade.” And the FGR announced in a statement that “a Canadian citizen voluntarily surrendered yesterday at the US embassy” in CDMX.
Wedding is accused of being responsible for sending cocaine from Colombia, through Mexico and southern California, to Canada, and the legal basis for his transfer to US territory was his “voluntary delivery,” security officials indicated.
The athlete was identified, in information provided to the media by the security cabinet, as responsible for “constantly sending hundreds of kilos of cocaine” to the United States and his native Canada, and that in that context, on September 17, 2024, an arrest warrant was issued for “conspiracy to distribute controlled substances and to possess them for distribution purposes; conspiracy to export cocaine; homicide and attempted homicide in connection with a permanent criminal enterprise and the crime of drug trafficking.”
Last December, the Mexican authorities reported that, based on international collaboration, personnel from the FGR and the Secretariats of the Mexican Navy, Security and Citizen Protection (SSPC), National Defense and the National Guard, in operations carried out in the Mexican capital, seized 62 high-end motorcycles, two vehicles, works of art, two Olympic medals, cartridges, a charger and various documentation, related to the former Olympic champion of snowboard.
Wedding is one of the FBI’s 10 most wanted fugitives, and the United States Department of State’s Narcotics Reward Program offered a reward of up to $10,000 for information leading to his arrest.
Alejandro Rosas, extradited
Likewise, yesterday the authorities announced the handover to Patel, in national territory, and the immediate transfer to the United States of Alejandro Rosas Castillo, whose arrest was reported by the Mexican government on January 17.
The SSPC reported that “derived from intelligence work and the exchange of information with the FBI, in Pachuca, Hidalgo, elements of the SSPC and FGR executed an arrest and extradition order against Castillo, who has a red card and is wanted by authorities of the state of North Carolina, United States, for charges of first-degree murder, robbery with a weapon, vehicle theft and first-degree kidnapping.”
