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Guns at Mexican Crime Scenes Linked to U.S. Sting

WASHINGTON — Congressional investigators examining a gun-trafficking sting investigation known as Operation Fast and Furious have identified 122 weapons linked to the operation that have been recovered at crime scenes in Mexico, according to a report they are expected to release Tuesday.

The report, which offers new details about the operation, lists 48 occasions between November 2009 and February 2011 in which Mexican authorities found one or more such weapons, based on internal e-mails of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, whose Phoenix office set up the operation. It was compiled by the staffs of Representative Darrell Issa of California and Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the two Republicans leading the investigation.

“The faulty design of Operation Fast and Furious led to tragic consequences,” the report concludes. “Countless United States and Mexican citizens suffered as a result.”

The report also gives details of the murder of the brother of a Mexican law enforcement official and several shootouts involving Mexican police helicopters, alleging a tie to Fast and Furious guns because some were found among larger weapons caches connected to cartels. However, it offers no direct evidence that guns linked to the operation were used in those cases.

The report comes as the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, of which Mr. Issa is chairman, is preparing to hold a hearing on the operation on Tuesday that will focus on allegations by A.T.F. agents based in Mexico that they were kept in the dark about the operation, that they believed it was allowing guns to reach Mexican cartels, and that they were brushed off when they raised concerns.

Operation Fast and Furious was an investigation by the A.T.F.’s Phoenix office into a suspected network of “straw” gun buyers who were buying weapons, including a variant of the AK-47 assault rifle, from weapons dealers in the United States, where they may be legally purchased, for use by drug cartels based in Mexico, where it is illegal to sell such guns. It ran from around late 2009 to early 2011, and 20 people, to date, have been charged in connection with it.

The operation was internally controversial because some A.T.F. agents believed they should be moving to arrest the lower-level buyers and to intercept the guns more swiftly. The critics went to Congress after two guns linked to the operation were found at the scene of the murder of a Border Patrol agent in December.

Much remains murky about the operation. It is not clear, for example, how many of the roughly 2,000 guns linked to Fast and Furious the A.T.F. had an opportunity to intercept because they had enough evidence to arrest the buyer at the time or at least knew about the purchase as it was taking place. The agency entered some of the guns into its database of “suspect” serial numbers well after the guns had left a store, based on purchase paperwork rather than surveillance.

Last week, the Justice Department told Congress that the firearms bureau “was not aware of the majority of these purchases at the time they actually occurred.” It also said that about 600 of the 2,000 guns were purchased before the agency identified the buyer as a suspected straw purchaser. Still, A.T.F. agents have described other instances in which they watched guns being purchased and followed the buyers to houses, but later broke off surveillance.

Details about the guns that have been recovered in Mexico also remain unclear. The new report lists 122 such weapons, but says its accounting is incomplete. It also cites an A.T.F. e-mail from December 2010 saying that 241 such guns had been recovered in Mexico — as well as a claim by a now-retired A.T.F. attaché to Mexico, Darren Gil, that put the figure at 700 by October 2010.

The new report describes how agency officials in Mexico noticed, starting in late 2009, that a disproportionate number of the guns that were being recovered at Mexican crime scenes were linked to Phoenix stores. It portrays them as raising questions, and later alarms, about what was happening, only to be told that it was “under control.”

The report also asserts that the A.T.F. officials in Phoenix hid information about the Fast and Furious guns from their colleagues in Mexico by restricting access to the data in an electronic gun tracing system.

But Paul Pelletier, a lawyer for William Newell, the special agent in charge of the Phoenix office at the time of the operation, said such information was freely available to A.T.F. analysts in Mexico if they had used a separate procedure for searching the tracing system that is available only to the bureau.

Ginger Thompson contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: Guns at Crime Scenes Linked to U.S. Sting. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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