Mexico City, Feb 9 (IANS/EFE) After spending eight years in prisons in the US and Mexico, Mexican drug trafficker Sandra Avila Beltran, popularly known as the "Queen of the Pacific", has been released following a court ruling, according to the Mexican Prosecutor's office.
Avila Beltran left the Nayarit prison Sunday after the Second Unitary Court in Criminal Matters of Jalisco revoked her sentence for the crime of operations with illicit proceeds on appeal.
The Mexican attorney general (PGR) announced Saturday that the sentence was revoked the day before as Avila Beltran "already had been tried for the same offence both in Mexico and abroad".
According to Mexian media, Avila Beltran was greeted by her family on her release.
Born in 1960 in the Mexican state of Baja California, Avila Beltran is the niece of drug kingpin Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, and is considered to have inspired the protagonist of the best-selling novel "La Reina del Sur", by Spanish writer Arturo Perez-Reverte.
Avila Beltran operated in northern Mexico in the states of Jalisco and Sonora until the police found more than nine tonnes of cocaine on a ship in the Pacific port of Manzanillo.
Also Read
She was arrested in 2007 and accused by the PGR of smuggling into the country several tonnes of cocaine along with her partner, the Colombian Juan Diego Espinosa Ramirez.
At the end of 2010 a Mexican judge acquitted her of racketeering and money laundering offences, but retained her to be extradited to the US.
Avila Beltran was handed over to the US authorities and in 2013 a US federal court sentenced her to 70 months in prison.
Back in Mexico, she was sentenced to five years in prison, fined for the crime of illicit operations and locked up in the Federal Centre for Social Rehabilitation in Nayarit from which she was released Sunday.
--IANS/EFE
ab/dg