Mexico City – Seven dead, among them four police officers, and six wounded, one of them a federal prosecutor, are the latest victims of drug-related violence in Mexico, authorities said Monday.
Several armed men on Monday burst into an ephedrine laboratory in Coyoacan, south of Mexico City, and killed four policemen and wounded another who were guarding the place, said capital district attorney Bernardo Batiz.
The criminals bound the hands and feet of the police before summarily executing them and made off with about 40 containers of ephedrine, a substance used to produce methamphetamine, Batiz told the press.
Greater Mexico City and environs, over the past several months, have been subjected to a growing wave of murders, kidnappings and extortion that authorities attribute to organized criminal gangs.
Elsewhere, authorities in the northern state of Nuevo Leon on Monday found the decapitated body of a man in Monterrey, the state capital and the hub of Mexican industry.
The police found the body and the head of the victim in two plastic bags along the Apodaca-Monterrey highway, Francisco Marquez, an officer with the state police homicide squad, told journalists.
He said that the case “is very similar” to the murders over the past few months in the Pacific coast resort city of Acapulco, where rival drug trafficking gangs have beheaded and shot several people.
In another incident in Monterrey, gunmen in cars on Sunday night attacked the vehicle in which federal prosecutor Veronica Palacios and four other people were riding.
One of the passengers died, and Palacios and the other three people in the vehicle were wounded, along with a pedestrian, according to the police report. The assailants fled in three vehicles, witnesses told the police.
In addition, the authorities in the southern state of Guerrero on Monday reported finding the body of a man tied to a container filled with sand in the tourist town of Zihuatanejo, not far from Acapulco.
The body was the second one to be found in similar circumstances in less than a week in the region, officials said.
