Naharnet

Six Police Officers Killed in Mexico Ambush

Six police officers were killed in a suspected drug gang attack in the northern Mexican state of Zacatecas, after they were ambushed when driving home from a party, a report said Monday.

The policemen were returning to the city of Valparaiso in the early hours of Sunday after attending a festival in a nearby town, when they were held up by a group of gunmen who assaulted their vehicle with heavy weapons, said the Jornada newspaper on its website.

The attackers threw a grenade into the vehicle and the victims were burned to death, investigators told the newspaper.

Near the charred remains of the policemen's vehicle were three other unidentified bodies of people who had apparently been also recently executed, officials said.

The death toll in Mexico's increasingly chaotic drug wars in the first nine months of this year alone has hit 10,000, according to a recent tally by the newspaper Reforma. The deadliest states were Chihuahua, Nuevo Leon, Guerrero and Sinaloa, it found.

Some 41,000 people have been killed since Mexico launched a major crackdown in 2006 against powerful drug gangs which are themselves locked in brutal turf wars over lucrative trade routes from Central America to the United States.

Source: Agence France Presse


Copyright © 2012 Naharnet.com. All Rights Reserved. https://www.naharnet.com/stories/en/17068