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| Caribbean-Latin America |
| Gunmen kill 8 partygoers in Mexican coastal town, arrest 4 who killed 211 |
| 2009-08-31 |
| CULIACAN, Sinaloa - Gunmen opened fire on a crowd of young people partying at a seaside boulevard in northwestern Mexico, killing eight people and wounding four, an official said Sunday. A 15-year-old boy and a 17-year-old girl were among the victims of the shooting Saturday night in Navolato, a Pacific coast town in Sinaloa state, said Martin Robles, a spokesman for the state prosecutor's office. Another was the 20-year-old daughter of a local policeman. Police had no information on a possible motive. Sinaloa, the cradle of at least two of Mexico's main drug cartels, has long been a hotspot for gang violence. Robles said the unknown assailants fired at the crowd with AK-47 rifles as they drove by the festive crowd. Gang violence has claimed at least 13,500 lives since President Felipe Calderón took office in 2006 and sent tens of thousands of troops and federal police to battle cartels across Mexico. The government attributes most of the deaths to violence between rival gangs, although cartels have also stepped up attacks on police and other officials. Meanwhile, authorities arrested four men accused of killing at least 211 people for the Juarez cartel. Most of the killings took place in Ciudad Juarez, a city across the border from El Paso, Texas, according to a statement from the joint military and police force in charge of security in the city. In Tijuana, about 100 relatives of missing people demonstrated at site where a man allegedly helped a top drug lord dispose of 300 bodies over several years by dissolving them in a corrosive substance. |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |