Soldiers and federal agents detained 29 police officers in northern Mexico on Monday for alleged ties to drug traffickers.
It was Mexico’s latest sweep to root out corruption among police and government officials, which has been a major impediment to Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s battle against drug cartels. Last week, federal officials arrested 10 mayors and 20 other officials in the western state of Michoacan on suspicion of protecting La Familia cartel.
Soldiers and state and federal agents detained the 29 officers at police headquarters in the cities of Monterrey, San Nicolas de los Garza, Apodaca and the state public security offices, Nuevo Leon state district attorney Luis Carlos Trevino.
PHOTO: AP
The officers were detained after soldiers found evidence linking them to drug dealers who were arrested last month, the state government said in a statement. It did not give details on the evidence.
“We are working on cleaning up forces and this is one step of many that have to be taken to achieve that,” Trevino said.
Trevino said none of the 29 had been charged.
Outside of the state police headquarters, about 60 people who said they were relatives of the detained officers protested against military intrusion in police activities.
Calderon has sent more than 40,000 soldiers to battle drug trafficking across the country and acknowledged that corruption is pervasive among Mexican police at all levels.
Local law enforcement officials have followed the president’s lead and are increasingly relying on military officers to run their police departments.
On Monday, retired General Javier Aguayo took over as police chief for the northern city of Chihuahua, where drug-fueled violence has claimed hundreds of lives.
In the nearby city of Ciudad Juarez, gunmen opened fire in the lobby of a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center, killing five people on Sunday, Regional Deputy Attorney-General Alejandro Pariente said. Witnesses told police many of the 50 rehab patients climbed a fence to flee the attack.
Pariente said police were investigating whether Sunday’s attack was related to threats that administrators had received demanding they shut down the clinic.
It was the second shooting attack in six months at a rehab clinic in Ciudad Juarez, a city across the border from El Paso, Texas.
The city had seen a decline in drug violence since more than 5,000 extra troops were sent in to bolster security in February.
The killings capped a bloody weekend that left more than 30 people dead. Among the victims were a lawyer, a university professor and a female police officer who was shot to death after leaving work.
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.