Nuevo Laredo, Mexico – The police chief of this embattled border city resigned after eight months on the job amid a rash of recent drug-related killings.
Omar Pimentel, 38, presented a letter of resignation to Mayor Daniel Peña late Wednesday, hours after police found three charred bodies dumped by the side of a road leading into Nuevo Laredo.
Police did not immediately know how the bodies got there or who was behind the killings.
“I thank the mayor for the opportunity to collaborate in the 2005-2007 administration through such an important and key post,” Pimentel wrote.
Pimentel, who surrounded himself with at least a dozen bodyguards toting automatic rifles, didn’t give a reason for his resignation and didn’t answer his telephone Thursday. He had served as director of the city’s police academy before being named police chief in July.
Pimentel’s predecessor, Alejandro Dominguez, was gunned down just seven hours after being sworn in last June.
Shortly after Dominguez’s killing, the mayor fired half of the police force of 700 officers for alleged links to drug traffickers.
Pimentel promised to weed out corrupt officers and create a more professional police force, but months later he was still struggling to find qualified replacements.
His resignation comes amid a sharp increase in drug-related violence.
Since the beginning of the year, more than 57 people have been shot and killed in ambush-style attacks in Nuevo Laredo, compared with 23 during the same period last year.
Nuevo Laredo newspaper editors say they have been omitting the names of some victims of violence after drug traffickers have called and threatened reporters if the names are published.
The city of 330,000 across from Laredo, Texas, has been caught in a turf war between rival drug gangs fighting for billion-dollar smuggling routes into the United States.
In one of the latest attacks, four federal agents who were members of a special operations and intelligence wing of the Federal Preventive Police were killed last week by assailants who showered them with bullets in broad daylight in downtown Nuevo Laredo.
President Vicente Fox has assigned hundreds of federal agents armed with automatic weapons to patrol the city in an effort to curb drug violence, but he added that police presence has done little to stop the killings.
