A shooting that killed eight people partying on a seaside boulevard in northwestern Mexico may have been the work of vigilantes targeting car thieves, a prosecutor said.
The gunmen drove up in a white SUV and fired on the festive crowd without saying a word, Sinaloa state deputy Attorney General Jose Luis Leyva said on Sunday.
A 15-year-old boy and a 17-year-old girl were among the youngest killed on Saturday night in the Pacific coast town of Navolato. Four people were wounded.
Also among the dead were two brothers in their 30s who had a record of car theft, Leyva said. He said investigators were considering the possibility that the gunmen belonged to a criminal gang known as the “Death Squad,” which has been killing car thieves in the region.
“It’s one line of the investigation, and of course we are going to follow it,” Levya said.
He said ballistic evidence suggested that some people may have fired back at the gunmen.
Sinaloa, a state straddling Mexico’s northern Pacific coast, is the cradle of at least two main drug cartels and a longtime hotspot for gang violence.
Increasingly, civilians have been caught in the crossfire of Mexico’s relentless gang violence. Gunmen apparently targeting rivals have sprayed bullets into clubs, bars and taco stands. Last year, a grenade attack killed eight people and wounded 106 during an Independence Day celebration in the western city of Morelia.
The seaside boulevard in Navolato is a popular gathering place for young people on the weekends, but it was nearly deserted the day after the attack.
Gang violence has claimed at least 13,500 lives since Mexican President Felipe Calderon took office in 2006 and sent tens of thousands of troops and federal police to battle drug cartels across Mexico.
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.
The four men allegedly belong to La Linea, a gang of hit men for the Juarez cartel, the statement said. One of the men alone is accused of killing 97 people and another 87.
Security forces caught the men based on information from seven suspects arrested last week for allegedly killing a total of 39 people, the statement said.
Authorities gave no information on the victims or a timeframe for the killings. Vladimir Tuexi, a spokesman for the Chihuahua state attorney general’s office, said there would be no further comment for the time being to avoid undermining the investigation. Officials say the men confessed to the killings.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS