Gunmen burst into a bar in the northern Mexico city of Chihuahua, killing 15 people, including two journalists, prosecuting attorneys said on Saturday.
“They have been identified as Hector Javier Salinas Aguirre and Javier Moya Munoz, who were journalists from the city of Chihuahua with many years working at radio stations,” a source from the Chihuahua State attorney’s office said.
Nine other people died violently between Friday night and early Saturday in nearby communities, where gang drug violence is common.
They included four others from the city of Chihuahua; four from Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, and one from the town of Madera.
Hector Salinas, who for years was a radio reporter and former press chief for the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, most recently worked as director of the local news site Futuro.mx, officials said.
Javier Moya, a journalist and veterinarian, was chief news officer for a local radio station and had recently worked as a press spokesman for the city of Chihuahua.
Witnesses said that in the attack on Friday night about seven heavily armed men burst into a bar called La Colorada and demanded to know the whereabouts of two or three other men.
After getting no response, they opened fire indiscriminately, police said.
The massacre follows a similar shooting on Feb. 4, when an armed group burst into another Chihuahua bar and opened fire, killing nine people. They included five members of a band and a policewoman.
Authorities have not yet established a motive for the attack on Friday.
Chihuahua, which is the name of a Mexican state and the state’s capital city, shares a long border with the US. It is considered one of Mexico’s most dangerous regions because of drug cartel violence.
Violence linked to drug trafficking has left more than 50,000 dead in Mexico since December 2006, according to statistics reported in the news media.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
‘DELUSIONAL’: Targeting the families of Hamas’ leaders would not push the group to change its position or to give up its demands for Palestinians, Ismail Haniyeh said Israeli aircraft on Wednesday killed three sons of Hamas’ top political leader in the Gaza Strip, striking high-stakes targets at a time when Israel is holding delicate ceasefire negotiations with the militant group. Hamas said four of the leader’s grandchildren were also killed. Ismail Haniyeh’s sons are among the highest-profile figures to be killed in the war so far. Israel said they were Hamas operatives, and Haniyeh accused Israel of acting in “the spirit of revenge and murder.” The deaths threatened to strain the internationally mediated ceasefire talks, which appeared to gain steam in recent days even as the sides remain far
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of