Ten years after Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo was gunned down in an airport parking lot, the dispute over who killed him is more bitter than ever.
Prominent figures, including a man mentioned as a possible candidate for pope, have staked their futures on rival theories. Sainthood for Posadas could depend on the outcome.
Mexican investigators announced Friday that they have no firm evidence to support church claims that Posadas, killed 10 years ago Saturday, was assassinated, though they insist they are still seeking evidence.
That matched the findings of all earlier probes under six attorneys general, beginning with Jorge Carpizo, attorney general at the time of the slaying.
All concluded that Posadas was mistaken for a rich drug trafficker when he got out of his car during a gunbattle between rival gangs.
Posadas' successor Juan Sandoval Iniguez, sometimes mentioned as a candidate for pope, says someone in the government set up the shooting because Posadas knew about official involvement in drug trafficking. Church publications have suggested the attackers might have seized a list of officials involved in the drug trade.
If Sandoval is right, Posadas could be considered a martyr, which would help make him eligible for sainthood. In August 2000, Mexico City Cardinal Norberto Ortega said that there was a possibility that Posadas could be canonized because he had died "in the fulfillment of his duty."
Critics say the plot described by Sandoval didn't make sense. Sandoval insists it would have been impossible to confuse the cardinal, who was dressed in clerical garb, with a drug trafficker.
Carpizo, a former head of Mexico's national university and the country's first federal human rights ombudsman, calls Sandoval and three leading supporters "the infernal quartet" and accuses them of twisting, ignoring and manufacturing evidence.
Last week, he claimed they had paid drug traffickers to fabricate evidence.
"These people lie and lie again," Carpizo said.
The cardinal then told the Televisa network that Carpizo "took part" in the "operation to kill Cardinal Posadas," apparently by covering up for the killers.
On Friday, Justice Department chief investigator Marisela Morales told a news conference that her team had spent 23,600 hours, interviewed hundreds of witnesses and pored over 31,446 pages of evidence, old and new.
Morales said those efforts "have not produced the evidence that would permit us to affirm or prove the existence of a plot meant to take the life" of the cardinal.
Those who believe in the plot had hoped for a fresh hearing after President Vicente Fox was elected in 2000. That replaced the party that had run Mexico for 71 years, along with its Justice Department.
Fox is considered the most pro-church Mexican president in more than a century. His government reopened the investigation and named a former right-wing religious militant to oversee it.
Yet in an open letter to Fox on May 13, Mexico's Roman Catholic bishops complained that officials have failed to check Sandoval's allegations and complained that investigators "have not wanted to or have not been able to investigate in a profound and consistent manner."