Mexican police carried out the controlled detonation of a car bomb on Saturday in the troubled and increasingly violent city of Ciudad Juarez, just across from border from Texas.
A telephone tip around midnight led authorities to a dead body in a car in a shopping center parking lot, the federal Public Safety Department said in a statement. In a second car, police found the bomb.
Agents deactivated the device and removed most of the explosive material to analyze it before safely detonating the vehicle, the department said. There were no injuries.
Ciudad Juarez is the same city where drug traffickers staged the first successful car bombing in Mexico, killing three people in July.
There have been three other vehicle explosions in recent weeks in Ciudad Victoria, capital of the border state of Tamaulipas.
Ciudad, across from El Paso, Texas, has been one of the cities most affected by Mexico’s escelating drug violence in recent years.
BORDER VIOLENCE
More than 2,100 people have been murdered in the city so far this year — making it highly likely that last year’s gruesome and unwanted record of 2,700 murders will be surpassed by the end of the year.
Across the country, more than 28,000 people have been killed since December 2006, when Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched a military offensive against the cartels soon after taking office.
In the central state of Morelos, police discovered nine bodies in clandestine graves on Saturday in the same area where four more were recently found.
The Public Safety Department said in a separate statement that all 13 victims were believed to have been killed on the orders of US-born Edgar “La Barbie” Valdez Villarreal, one of the alleged kingpins fighting for control of Morelos.
Valdez was captured Aug. 30 by federal police.
US WARRANT
Late on Saturday, federal authorities announced they had arrested two Colombian brothers who they alleged have ties to Valdez and belong to a group responsible for buying cocaine in Colombia and smuggling it to the US.
The men were identified as Dario Emilio Valencia and Victor Espinosa Valencia. The latter was said to own the ranch on the outskirts of Mexico City where Valdez allegedly hid out before his arrest.
The Public Safety Department said both men were named in a US warrant issued in 2004 in Florida.
Incumbent Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa on Sunday claimed a runaway victory in the nation’s presidential election, after voters endorsed the young leader’s “iron fist” approach to rampant cartel violence. With more than 90 percent of the votes counted, the National Election Council said Noboa had an unassailable 12-point lead over his leftist rival Luisa Gonzalez. Official results showed Noboa with 56 percent of the vote, against Gonzalez’s 44 percent — a far bigger winning margin than expected after a virtual tie in the first round. Speaking to jubilant supporters in his hometown of Olon, the 37-year-old president claimed a “historic victory.” “A huge hug
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
A judge in Bangladesh issued an arrest warrant for the British member of parliament and former British economic secretary to the treasury Tulip Siddiq, who is a niece of former Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina, who was ousted in August last year in a mass uprising that ended her 15-year rule. The Bangladeshi Anti-Corruption Commission has been investigating allegations against Siddiq that she and her family members, including Hasina, illegally received land in a state-owned township project near Dhaka, the capital. Senior Special Judge of Dhaka Metropolitan Zakir Hossain passed the order on Sunday, after considering charges in three separate cases filed
APPORTIONING BLAME: The US president said that there were ‘millions of people dead because of three people’ — Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelenskiy US President Donald Trump on Monday resumed his attempts to blame Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for Russia’s invasion, falsely accusing him of responsibility for “millions” of deaths. Trump — who had a blazing public row in the Oval Office with Zelenskiy six weeks ago — said the Ukranian shared the blame with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who ordered the February 2022 invasion, and then-US president Joe Biden. Trump told reporters that there were “millions of people dead because of three people.” “Let’s say Putin No. 1, but let’s say Biden, who had no idea what the hell he was doing, No. 2, and
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