While trying to recapture him, Mexican police killed early Thursday morning the leader of a criminal group only days after he and other inmates escaped from prison when members of his gang stormed the facility on January 1, leaving 17 people dead.

Chihuahua governor Javier Corral alleges that the government of President Peña Nieto is denying his state financial resources in order to stop a corruption probe implicating high-ranking party officials and close aides of the President, the Guardian reported Tuesday.

A veteran figure of Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was arrested in December for diverting public funds to his party’s gubernatorial election campaigns in a failed effort to boost the PRI’s faltering popularity.