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Hitmen storm Mexican ranch, kill family

Hitmen killed eight people, including five members of one family, in Mexico’s northern Chihuahua state, officials said on Tuesday, as police found three decapitated bodies in a rubbish dump in Tijuana.

Gangland-style killings have claimed the lives of more than 2,700 people so far this year and official kidnapping figures have spiked, despite the deployment of more than 36,000 soldiers across the country in a government crackdown on drug gang-related violence.

Rights groups are planning mass demonstrations this Saturday over the growing insecurity.

In the attack in Chihuahua state, where most of the murders have taken place, a group of armed men stormed a family meeting on a ranch, killing five, the state prosecutor’s office said.

Officials did not name the victims but said that they were from the same family, including two brothers.

Meanwhile, three armed men killed a 25-year-old woman in her car near a shopping center in the state capital Chihuahua.

A man was executed, also driving a car, in the volatile town of Ciudad Juarez, bordering the US, and police found a corpse with bullet wounds to the head on a road between Chihuahua and Cuauhtemoc, police said.

Further west along the US border, just south of California, three decapitated and burned bodies, bearing messages referring to the Tijuana drug cartel, and three heads were thrown on a rubbish dump in Tijuana, authorities said.

The victims were believed to be three people kidnapped on Friday on a beach 20km from Tijuana, said Juan Salvador Ortiz, deputy Baja California State prosecutor.

The Reforma daily on Tuesday reported the discovery of the corpse of a recently kidnapped teacher’s son in the trunk of a car elsewhere in Baja California, for whom a ransom had been paid.

And in eastern Veracruz state, police found the bodies of two brothers kidnapped on Aug. 13, Reforma reported.

Mexico has now overtaken Colombia and Iraq with its kidnapping record, with some 323 cases reported in the first half of the year according to official figures and 400 according to a rights group, compared with 438 for the whole of last year.

Mexican leaders last week signed a national security pact, including a purge of widely corrupt police.
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