Gunmen kidnapped nine police officers investigating a death in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero and the bodies of two of the lawmen were found later, authorities said on Saturday.
Fernando Monreal Leyva, director of the State Investigative Police, said one of his agency’s commanders and a team of eight agents had gone to identify and recover a body in a northern part of the state on Friday. He said contact was lost with the group that afternoon and officials learned the officers had been seized by an unknown gang of gunmen.
Searchers found the bodies of two officers near El Revelado, the community where the police group was kidnapped, Monreal said. He said the Mexican army was helping police search for the other missing officers.
Several drug gangs are battling for control of smuggling routes in Guerrero state.
In another part of Guerrero, unidentified men traveling in two vehicles threw two human heads into a refreshment stand in Coyuca de Catalan, state police said. One of the heads was blindfolded with duct tape.
Monreal said the incident was not connected to the kidnapping of his officers.
Authorities in Ciudad Juarez, a northern border city gripped by drug violence, said police arrested two alleged leaders of the Aztecs gang linked to at least 10 murders, including the killing of a federal police officer last month.
The detainees were identified as Gonzalo Dominguez Sanchez, known as “El Chore,” and Eduardo Rocha, alias “El Dienton,” both 29.
Federal police said Dominguez was the successor to alleged Aztecs leader Jesus Ernesto Chavez Castillo, “El Camello,” who was arrested on July 2. Rocha was described as the gang’s second in command.
Federal police said the men were caught with an AR-15 rifle, two loaded pistols and more than 1.6kg of cocaine.
In northeastern Mexico, troops killed three suspected drug cartel gunmen in a gunbattle and also freed a kidnap victim near the industrial city of Monterrey, the Mexican Defense Department said on Saturday.
A military statement said soldiers responding to an anonymous tip in the town of Mina, in Nuevo Leon state, were fired on by three gunmen traveling in an SUV with Texas license plates on Friday afternoon. The three attackers were killed and troops recovered three rifles, two grenades, 475 bullets and four military-style uniforms, the army said.
Later on Friday, soldiers came across an SUV that had crashed against the wall of a bridge in the town of Sabinas Hidalgo, also in Nuevo Leon, the press release continued.
Soldiers found a man with a bulletproof jacket inside the vehicle, along with an AK-47 rifle and three ammunition clips. Meanwhile, Mexican soldiers deactivated a bomb at a mall in central Mexico on Saturday, but it was not clear if the incident was tied to the country’s drug war, Mexican newspaper Milenio reported.
A message from a criminal group was left with the bomb in Leon, Milenio said. There was no information on the nature of the group. Authorities in Leon, a city of about 1 million people, were not immediately available for comment.
The newspaper said workers found an “explosive device” in the mall’s parking lot and alerted authorities. Army troops deactivated it. Nobody was reported injured.
Mexican drug gangs started using car bombs this year to target police, but have so far not used bombs against the general population.
Four people were killed in July in Ciudad Juarez by a bomb planted in a car, the first such attack since Mexican Presidenty Felipe Calderon took office in December 2006.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
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
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion