Indian police said Tuesday they are seeking custody of a fugitive arrested in Hong Kong who is wanted for a daring jailbreak in Punjab that freed a militant and for a string of other crimes.

Ramanjit Singh, an Indian national on Interpol's global watch list, was detained this month by Hong Kong authorities for his alleged involvement in a local robbery, according to local media reports.

India's federal police had asked Interpol to issue a red notice for Singh's arrest so he could be extradited and tried for crimes ranging from jailbreak to forgery, attempted murder and financing extremism.

A red notice is a request to locate and provisionally arrest a person pending extradition.

Police in Punjab, the northern Indian state where Singh was born, said they wanted the 29-year-old brought home to stand trial.

"We sent a provisional request through our foreign ministry for Ramanjit's custody after his arrest in Hong Kong," Superintendent Harwinder Singh Virk told AFP.

"We will follow it up with whatever formalities are required by their authorities."

Virk said Singh was arrested in 2016 in possession of weapons and fraudulent ATM cards, but fled the country after being granted bail.

He is accused by Indian authorities of masterminding a prison break in 2016 in which armed men disguised as policemen stormed a high-security jail in Punjab and freed a top Sikh militant commander and four others.

The attackers, who travelled in cars, stabbed and injured a guard at the prison gate and fired several shots before fleeing with the inmates. Two other guards were also injured.

"He was in touch with all the attackers," said Virk of Singh, whom police had identified as the ringleader of the operation that embarrassed prison authorities.

Singh's birthplace is listed on his Interpol red notice as Moga district in Punjab.

Local police say he lived in the northern Indian state as a young boy but stayed in Hong Kong from around the age of nine.

Mexican troops kill 'El Chapo' family security chief
Mexico City (AFP) Feb 28, 2018 - Mexican soldiers and police killed the security chief for the family of jailed drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman on Tuesday, officials said.

The defense ministry said a shootout erupted when security forces raided a building in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state, where Guzman's Sinaloa cartel is based.

"They were attacked by a group of individuals who tried to escape," the ministry said in a joint statement with federal prosecutors.

Two people were killed in the gunfight and three arrested, including two who were wounded, the statement said.

Officials identified one of the dead as Luis Alfonso "N."

A government source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the person in question was Luis Alfonso Murillo Acosta, head of security for the Guzman family and a hitman for El Chapo's son, Archivaldo Ivan Guzman Salazar.

Murillo Acosta is accused of coordinating a September 2016 attack on army troops that killed five soldiers and wounded 12, said the source.

El Chapo, 60, was one of the world's most powerful drug traffickers.

But his reign was cut short in January 2017 when he was extradited to the United States following his capture after a brash escape from a Mexican prison, his second jailbreak.

Guzman, who is being held in solitary confinement in New York pending trial, told a judge earlier this month that he is struggling to pay for his lawyers.

He is accused of trafficking more than 200 tonnes of cocaine into the United States.

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Vietnam cops seize $2.5 mn heroin in China border drug bust
Hanoi (AFP) Feb 26, 2018
Five men were arrested in Vietnam for allegedly attempting to smuggle $2.5 million worth of heroin into China after police shot at their drug-packed vehicle as they tried to flee, local media reported Monday. The men were caught in northern Cao Bang province on the border with China with nearly 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of heroin from Laos in their truck, state-run Thanh Nien newspaper reported. Vietnam is a key trafficking hub for narcotics from the "Golden Triangle" covering Laos, Thailand a ... read more