Gunman Fired Mexico Ten Killed
September 17, 2009 by Trend PK
Filed under Pakistan News
CIUDAD JUAREZ: For the second time in two weeks a drug rehabilitation center in Mexico’s violence-scarred Ciudad Juarez became a scene of carnage, when a gunman opened fire and killed 10 people, authorities said on Wednesday.
The attack, which police said was the sixth in the past year at a Mexican drug rehab facility, underscores how drug clinics and their patients have become new targets in deadly turf battles between rival traffickers.
“The attack that killed 10 people was at the Annex of Life AC hostel,” a source from the Municipal Public Security Secretariat (SSPM) who requested anonymity told AFP.
The shooting late Tuesday coincided with Independence Day festivities including noisy fireworks displays that appear to have obscured crime.
Some residents at the live-in facility had already gone to bed, and others were watching television in a common area when they were surprised by a gunman who slipped into the center undetected and opened fire.
Some survivors told police that when bullets began to fly, they initially thought they were hearing the sounds of fireworks.
The assault was carried out despite stepped up security around festivities marking the 199th anniversary of the start of Mexico’s struggle for independence from Spain.
Twenty-one other people were also killed in Juarez overnight into Wednesday, including five gunned down in a bar and a federal police agent shot dead outside the general prosecutor’s office, authorities said.
Mexico’s bloody drug violence is at epidemic proportions with some 10,000 people dead since 2008 despite the government deployment of tens of thousands of soldiers across the country, with murders including gruesome beheadings and dismemberments.
Tuesday’s shooting was similar to one that occurred here in early September, when gunmen lined up 18 people and executed them at another drug treatment clinic in this city, a key drug transit point which lies across the border from El Paso, Texas.
Some 8,500 soldiers have been deployed across Juarez, a city of 1.4 million people, to stem violence as cartels vie for control of lucrative smuggling routes and dominance of the local narcotics market.
In April, US President Barack Obama and Mexican President Felipe Calderon set out an ambitious bilateral agenda to weaken drug cartels, including improved enforcement of existing gun trafficking laws. Obama also acknowledged that drug consumption in the United States has fueled the violence by helping to keep the cartels in business.
The upsurge of violence here dates back to last year, when the local Linea cartel vying for control against the upstart Sinaloa cartel — once part of a joint alliance– ended their affiliation and made a mutual declaration of war.
The rivalry also is fueled by the personal animosity between the heads of the two groups, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes of the Juarez cartel and Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman of the Sinaloa cartel.
Meanwhile, Michoacan’s state capital Morelia, Calderon’s home city, is also home to the notoriously violent La Familia drug cartel, which teams up with the Los Zetas group of paramilitaries comprised of former soldiers.
Authorities blame La Familia for the deaths of 12 federal intelligence agents whose bodies were discovered dumped along a road in Michoacan last July.
La Familia made an ominous and dramatic debut in 2006 when members rolled five decapitated heads onto a nightclub dance floor.
Gunman Fired Mexico Ten Killed was first posted on September 17, 2009 at 11:55 am.
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