Mexican schoolteacher turned Knights Templar drug lord arrested in ambush

Mexican police nabbed the most-wanted drug lord Servando Gomez, a former schoolteacher whose Knights Templar cartel tormented western Michoacan state, smuggled drugs to the US and illegally shipped iron ore to China.

The man nicknamed "La Tuta" was detained by federal officers without a shot fired as he exited a house in Morelia, Michoacan’s capital, following months of intelligence work, officials said.

Gomez, 49, was taken to Mexico City and frogmarched in front of television cameras, wearing a black sweater and jeans as two masked federal police officers held him down by the neck and led him into a helicopter.

The balding, goateed kingpin had eluded authorities last year despite a massive manhunt in the mountains of Michoacan with help from a "rural defence" force comprised of former vigilantes, who had taken up arms against the Knights Templar.

With his arrest, the authorities have now taken down all the top leaders of the cult-like cartel, dealing a huge blow to a group that once dominated the agricultural and mining state through murder, kidnappings and extortion.

"Today we have achieved the most important objective in the fight against organised crime: the detention of the most wanted criminal in all of Mexico," Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said before Gomez was presented outside an airport hangar for federal prosecutors.