Shooters on Saturday stormed a water park in central Mexico and killed six adults and a child, unleashing panic among those present, local authorities said.
Police “arrived at the scene where they found ... three dead women, three men and a seven-year-old minor, in addition to one person seriously wounded,” said a statement from the city hall in Cortazar, the municipality where the attack took place.
The surrounding state of Guanajuato in central Mexico has seen a surge in drug-related violence in the past few years.
Photo: Reuters
The shooters arrived at the La Palma swimming resort at 4:30pm “to perpetrate the attack,” the statement said.
The attackers went directly toward a group of people and opened fire, then yanked out security cameras from the site before retreating, authorities said.
Video footage posted on local news site Debate Noticias, which was taken by an eyewitness at the scene, showed the victims collapsed on the floor or on the chairs where they were sitting amid thick clouds of smoke — apparently from the gunshots.
The footage also shows people running for cover from the gunfire.
The Web site of TV Azteca, one of Mexico’s main television networks, had video footage from the scene showing panic-stricken adults and children still in swimwear — including pool floats — on the scene after the shooting.
The attack occurred on the last day of the spring school vacation period.
The resort, abutting a university campus, was swarmed by military and state police after the attack. Guanajuato, a thriving industrial state, has become one of Mexico’s most violent due to the dispute between the Santa Rosa de Lima crime group and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, dedicated to fuel theft and drug trafficking.
Mexico has registered more than 350,000 murders since the government controversially deployed the army to fight drug cartels in 2006, most of them blamed on criminal gangs.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
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,
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
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
RSS