Two Mexican police killed in city on U.S. border

The San Diego Union-Tribune

REUTERS

10:05 a.m. November 19, 2005

CHIHUAHUA, Mexico – Unidentified attackers killed two Mexican police officers in Ciudad Juarez on the U.S. border in a resurgence of drug-related violence this week, authorities said Saturday.

Hit men armed with assault rifles gunned down municipal police officer Jorge Luis Carrillo as he patrolled the streets of the city, which lies south of the border from El Paso, Texas, Friday. More than 30 shots were fired in the attack.

Later in the day police found the body of a second local officer, Oscar Lucero, in an abandoned car in the city. He had been suffocated with a plastic bag and his body showed signs of torture, Chihuahua state prosecutors said.

The killings came less than a month after police found the bodies of a former Interpol chief and his lawyer crammed into oil drums and sealed with concrete in a residential area of Juarez. Both had been suffocated with a plastic bag.

The industrial city of 1.3 million is a notorious drug trafficking hub controlled by the so-called Juarez cartel, a loose affiliation of drug gangs from the western state of Sinaloa that are prone to bloody feuding.

Last year there was a spike in drug-related killings in the city triggered by a round of high-value cocaine and marijuana seizures there, although gangland violence has been eclipsed in recent months by a turf war further east on the U.S. border.

More than 160 people have been killed since January in Nuevo Laredo, across from Laredo, Texas, most in a battle between the local Gulf Cartel and rival gangs from Sinaloa.