Police acting on a tip found nine bodies partially buried in the desert on the outskirts of the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, and authorities announced the arrest of a suspected leader of a drug cartel hit squad.
Investigators searched the desert site south of the city on Saturday to see whether there were any more bodies.
An official with the state prosecutor’s office who declined to be named in line with department policy said a police officer’s badge was found at the site. Authorities were working to identify the bodies.
PHOTO: AFP
State security official Enrique Torres Valadez said a total of nine bodies, seven male and two female, have been found so far.
“One was handcuffed, all were tortured,” he said. “They had been there for days or maybe weeks.”
Ciudad Juarez, a city of 1.3 million people across the border from El Paso, Texas, has been hit by a wave of drug-fueled violence, prompting federal authorities to dispatch thousands of soldiers.
Torres said 1,500 more troops were arriving on Saturday, on top of 2,150 who arrived on Friday.
Farther east, in the border city of Reynosa, federal police announced on Saturday that they had arrested a man who allegedly led operations there for the feared Zetas, a group of hit men for the Gulf drug cartel.
Sergio Pena Mendoza, 39, is also suspected of participating in an unsuccessful plot to free an imprisoned Zetas leader from jail in neighboring Guatemala, authorities told a news conference in Mexico City.
Pena Mendoza was arrested after he tried to flee a police patrol in a stolen pickup truck with Texas plates. Police found an assault rifle in the truck and said Pena Mendoza was suspected of killing a police official and a businessman in southern Mexico.
Mexican Interim Federal Police Commissioner Rodrigo Esparza said Pena Mendoza achieved the same rank in the Zetas — and was a possible replacement for — Jaime Gonzalez Duran, also known as “The Hummer,” a founding member of the gang who was arrested in Reynosa in November.
Questioned by reporters as he was led through police installations in Mexico City, Pena Mendoza denied the accusations.
Also on Saturday, a male suspect threw a hand grenade at police officers in the western city of Guadalajara, a statement from the Jalisco state prosecutor’s office said. The statement did not report any injuries, and local media said nobody was hurt because the device rolled into a parking lot.
Police detained the suspect and later found 14 more grenades and 10 assault rifles in his home.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.