Cops rush Tijuana house to end 3-hour gunbattle

6 bodies found inside with suspects

By Sandra Dibble

UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

11:26 p.m. January 17, 2008

TIJUANA – Automatic weapons rattled, neighbors huddled low in their locked homes and uniformed preschoolers were hustled to safety as heavily armed law enforcement agents stormed a house Thursday in a middle-class neighborhood here and found the bodies of six people believed to be victims of the Arellano Felix drug cartel.

One suspect was killed and four police agents were injured in the three-hour gun battle.

Mexican authorities announced Thursday night at a news conference that four people were in custody, including a Tijuana police officer and a man who identified himself as a member of the Baja California ministerial police.

The suspects are members of a cell of the notoriously violent cartel, said Edgar Millan, a top official with Mexico's federal Public Security Secretariat. While the drug gang is believed to have lost its lock on the region's drug trade in recent years, it remains active.

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Officials find 6 executed kidnapping victims in Tijuana house after shootout
By Luis Perez
ASSOCIATED PRESS
9:41 p.m. January 17, 2008

TIJUANA, Mexico – Officials said they found six executed kidnapping victims inside a Tijuana house where gunmen took refuge Thursday during a chaotic three-hour shootout with soldiers and police.

The victims, all male, were blindfolded and gagged and had been shot in the head, said Edgar Millan, a spokesman with the federal Public Safety Department, at a news conference in Tijuana.

Soldiers, state and local police were sent in to help control the firefight that began when federal agents prepared to raid a house in the Tijuana neighborhood of La Mesa that police now say was a shelter for a cell of the Arellano Felix drug cartel.

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Mexican federal officer dies in wake of raid
By Sandra Dibble
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
9:57 p.m. January 18, 2008

TIJUANA – A federal police officer has died after participating in Thursday's raid on a house where authorities found the bodies of six alleged victims of the Arellano Felix drug cartel.

Miguel Cedillo Gachuz, 24, was pronounced dead at the Red Cross Hospital, Agustn Perez, a spokesman for the Baja California Public Safety Secretariat, said Friday. A bullet had struck the officer in the head during a shootout with men barricaded inside the large brick house in a middle-class section of Tijuana's La Mesa district.