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Six Killed In Mexico City Amid Wave Of Drug-related Attacks
MEXICO CITY - At least six people were shot dead in the capital and five factory workers were killed on the border, officials said Thursday, amid a string of particularly violent attacks, even for Mexico.
The country has seen at least three other slaughters in the past week, including 15 recovering drug addicts killed at a car wash, 13 others gunned down at a drug rehabilitation center in Tijuana and 14 people, mostly teenagers, massacred at a party in the most violent city of Ciudad Juarez.
Officials blame most of the attacks on feuding drug gangs, and say more than 28,000 people have been killed in drug-related attacks since 2006.
During the pre-dawn killings in Mexico City's notoriously crime-ridden Tepito neighborhood on Thursday, a gang opened fire on a group of men in front of a store, Miguel Angel Mancera of the city's attorney general's office told journalists.
"Six people died on the spot and another is seriously wounded in hospital," Mancera said in revising downward an earlier toll of seven.
The victims, all in their twenties, died in an apparent dispute between criminal gangs, Mancera said.
In the north, five female factory workers were killed and 14 others injured as they traveled home from work early Monday near Ciudad Juarez, local police said.
Armed attackers ambushed three buses and began shooting indiscriminately inside, a police official from Caseta town told local media.
Twelve of the injured were women and two were men, and at least eight were in a critical state, the official said, declining to be named.
He said the workers were from the US-based Eagle Ottawa company, which makes automobile interiors.
Mexico has seen a rise in violence since the government launched an offensive on organized crime in 2006, involving some 50,000 troops.
Various criminal gangs are fighting for control of key trafficking routes into the United States, particularly along the northern border.
Suspected drug violence has claimed more than 7,000 lives nationwide so far this year, making it the deadliest since President Felipe Calderon launched his clampdown.
In the past week, police recovered some 28 bodies from separate attacks near the Pacific beach resort of Acapulco, which officials blamed on disputes between the powerful Sinaloa gang and the Beltran Leyva cartel.
AFP
