A Mexican drug cartel is responsible for a cellphone-detonated car bomb that killed four people in a city on the US border, state security forces said on Friday.
In the first attack of its kind in Mexico’s drug war, the explosion tore through a major intersection in Ciudad Juarez across the border from El Paso, Texas, late on Thursday, damaging nearby buildings and sending flames into the air.
Federal police blamed La Linea, the armed wing of the powerful Juarez cartel, for the attack and Mexico’s security ministry said it was retaliation for the arrest this week of a Juarez cartel member.
PHOTO: REUTERS
“There were 10 kilos of explosives, activated from a distance by a cellphone,” said Enrique Torres, an army spokesman in Ciudad Juarez, a manufacturing center that has become one of the world’s deadliest cities over the past two-and-a-half years.
TV images showed the wreck of a car with just one front wheel intact and two federal police vehicles charred and on fire after the blast in the city’s downtown area.
The army said C4 plastic explosive was used in the attack, which killed a policeman, a doctor, a rescue worker and an unidentified man.
Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz said drug gangs set up an elaborate trap in which a wounded man dressed as a city police officer was dumped on the street as bait. The assailants then called emergency services to lure federal police to the scene and detonated the bomb as they arrived, the mayor told a news conference.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon is battling surging violence across the country after launching his military-backed crackdown on drug gangs in December 2006. More than 26,000 people have been killed.
The violence is worrying Washington and some investors in the oil-producing country.
Twelve people, including two civilians, died in shootouts between the army and drug gangs in Nuevo Laredo across from Texas on Friday, underscoring the challenges facing Mexico’s new interior minister, Jose Francisco Blake, appointed by Calderon this week.
Two rival drug gangs — the local Juarez cartel and the Sinaloa cartel led by Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman — have been fighting an all-out war in Ciudad Juarez for control of the drug trade that has killed nearly 6,000 people there in the past three-and-a-half years.
Assailants have decapitated people and gunned down rivals in daylight attacks. But the car bomb was a clear escalation of the violence, a US law enforcement source said.
“What you are seeing now is a whole new level of violence. It’s a vehicle-born improvised explosive device,” said the source, who is following the investigation closely and did not want to be named.
“This has raised the bar to a level of violence that Mexico has not seen yet. It is reminiscent of Colombia ... What we are seeing now is what the military is running into in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the source said.
Graffiti scrawled on a wall near the blast said the attack was the work of the Juarez cartel and warned that “what occurred ... would continue to happen to authorities that carry on supporting Shorty.”
Mexican authorities arrested Jesus Armando Acosta Guerrero, who is accused of being a senior member of the Juarez cartel, on Thursday in Ciudad Juarez.
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person
RSS