Gunmen armed with assault rifles and grenades attacked a convoy carrying the top security official of the western state of Michoacan on Saturday, killing four and wounding 10 in Mexico’s second brazen ambush in as many days.
Mexican Public Safety Secretary Minerva Bautista was among the wounded, but was recovering from non-life-threatening injuries, said an official at the state attorney general’s office who was not authorized to be quoted by name. Bautista was traveling in a bullet-resistant sport utility vehicle.
The dead included two of her bodyguards and two bystanders. Of the other nine people wounded, five were bystanders — including two girls aged two and 12 — and four were part of Bautista’s security detail.
There was no immediate information on the identity of the attackers, who numbered about 20, or on a possible motive. However, drug violence is common in Michoacan, the home base of the drug cartel known as La Familia.
Mexican drug cartels have been known to target security officials. The acting federal police chief was shot dead in May 2008 in an attack attributed to drug traffickers lashing back at a nationwide crackdown on organized crime.
Bautista was returning from the inauguration of a fair when her three-vehicle convoy was stopped just after midnight by a truck the attackers apparently used to block the road. Several hours later, assailants tossed a hand grenade at a police station in the Michoacan state capital, Morelia, about 30m from the state public safety department’s headquarters. The explosion damaged three vehicles, but nobody was hurt.
Farther south, in the Pacific coast state of Guerrero, the dismembered bodies of three men were found in plastic bags inside a home outside the resort of Acapulco on Saturday.
Guerrero state police said a message was found at the scene.
Mexican police generally do not release the contents of such messages, but local media said the hand-lettered sign blamed the three dead men for an April 14 shooting that killed six people on Acapulco’s main boulevard. That daylight shooting in Acapulco’s balmy tourist zone killed a mother and her eight-year-old child, a taxi driver, a federal police officer and two other men.
One of the suspects detained in that shooting is described as an associate of Texas-born Edgar Valdez Villarreal, nicknamed “La Barbie,” who Mexican federal authorities believe is battling Hector Beltran Leyva for control of the Beltran Leyva cartel.
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