MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -- The confessed killer of a leading Mexican
                  politician has implicated former president Carlos Salinas for the first time in
                  the murder and in the killing of the ruling party's 1994 presidential candidate.

                  In a 17-page letter sent on Thursday to Multivision television and reprinted
                  by most Mexican newspapers on Friday, jailed hitman Daniel Aguilar
                  Trevino said the murders of Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu and Luis Donaldo
                  Colosio in 1994 were planned in the president's office where Salinas ruled
                  from 1988-1994.

                  Salinas' brother Raul was sentenced this month to 50 years in jail for
                  ordering the killing of Ruiz Massieu, secretary general of the Institutional
                  Revolutionary Party (PRI) when he was gunned down by Aguilar Trevino in
                  September 1994.

                  The whereabouts of Carlos Salinas, who fled to exile in Ireland in 1995 after
                  his power and prestige were wiped out by the arrest of his brother and a
                  devastating collapse of the economy, were unknown and no comment was
                  possible.

                  Investigators have been unable to solve the March 1994 assassination in the
                  northern border city of Tijuana of Colosio, a reform-minded member of the
                  PRI. Current President Ernesto Zedillo took over the PRI candidacy after
                  Colosio's death.

                  In the letter, Aguilar Trevino said Massieu was killed by "Salinasism," a term
                  used in Mexico to refer to the Salinas machine, because "(Massieu) knew
                  the order to assassinate Colosio was forged in Los Pinos." Los Pinos is the
                  name of the president's official residence.

                  "One murder unfortunately led to another -- and it could have been many
                  more -- given that the assassination of Mr. Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta
                  was forged in Los Pinos and accepted by the Salinas machine," he said.

                  "Maybe not everybody agreed, but everyone accepted (the murder), some
                  for personal interest, others for political pressure, and others to not upset the
                  Salinas machine."

                  Mexican newspapers have reported Carlos Salinas travelled to Cuba this
                  month to be near his brother at the time of sentencing.

                  It was the first time the former president himself had been linked in any way
                  to the Colosio and Ruiz Massieu murders, which shook Mexico to its
                  foundations and in part helped bring about the economic crisis of 1995 that
                  followed a botched devaluation of the peso the previous December.

                  Aguilar Trevino said the presidential apparatus "delegated" the Ruiz Massieu
                  murder to Raul Salinas and Carlos Salinas' former strongman, Jose Cordoba
                  Montoya, a special aide regarded as the eminence gris of Los Pinos at the
                  time.

                  Aguilar Trevino first broke four years of silence this week in an interview
                  with Time magazine in which he said agents of Raul Salinas kidnapped his
                  family to ensure he did not implicate his bosses.

                   Copyright 1999 Reuters.