MEXICO CITY, Sept. 21 (Xinhuanet) -- Mexican Public Security Minister Martin Huerta and several other senior officials have been confirmed dead as a result of a helicopter crash in mountains near the capital on Wednesday.

Mexican President Vicente Fox makes a speech to the nation in Mexico City September 21, 2005 to express his sorrow over the death of his public security minister Ramon Martin Huerta who died in a helicopter crash near Mexico City on Wednesday. (Xinhua/Reuters photo)

    At his residence of Los Pinos on Wednesday evening, Mexican President Vicente Fox announced the deaths of Huerta, Federal Police Commander Tomas Valencia and several other top officials in the crash of the helicopter that took them from Mexico City to the high-security prison of La Palma, in Mexico state.

    Rescue workers found the burned wreckage of Huerta's aircraft six hours after contact was lost during the flight. The helicopter took off from a military parade grounds and was headed to La Palmaprison, west of Mexico City, which holds several of Mexico's most feared drug capos, a Fox's spokesman said.

    Huerta, 48, head of Mexico's federal police and a former governor of the central state of Guanajuato, was a top figure in the war launched this year against drug-related crimes on the US border and in western Mexico.

    Huerta was also one of the president's closest aides and an old friend. He was Fox's campaign director when Fox ran for governor of the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, and served as interiorsecretary after Fox's election in 1995. After Fox became president,Huerta took over as interim governor of Guanajuato.

    Valencia, chief of the preventative police, oversaw 13,000 officers, the country's second largest police force.

    In a televised address Wednesday, President Fox vowed to push on with his fight against violent gangs running drugs into the United States.

    

Helicopters search a missing helicopter in the Marqueza hills, Mexico, September 21, 2005.  (Xinhua/Reuters)

He said the Bell 412 helicopter carrying Huerta and other officials had crashed in a "terrible accident" but gave no reason for the crash.

    Fox created the Public Safety Department after taking office in2000, combining federal police forces overseeing prisons, highways and borders -- including the Federal Preventative Police, a force that includes soldiers assigned to police work like crowd and riotcontrol.

    As a trusted Fox ally, Huerta was appointed to lead the agency in August 2004 after the previous secretary, Alejandro Gertz Manero, resigned to return to private life.

    Jose Antonio Bernal, an inspector from the National Human Rights Commission, a state-run watchdog, was also killed in the helicopter crash.

    He had received at least three death threats from Osiel Cardenas, the jailed head of the infamous Gulf Cartel drug gang, said a commission spokesman.

    More than 1,000 people have been killed this year as drug gangsfight over lucrative smuggling routes to the United States. Enditem