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Heavily armed soldiers are driving to the area where more than a dozen police officers were killed after their convoy was ambushed by suspected drug traffickers, prompting a massive manhunt by police, soldiers, Marines and the National Guard in Coatepec Harinas, Mexico, on Thursday. , March 18, 2021.
AP
MEXICO CITY – Apparently gunmen from a gang of drug traffickers ambushed a police convoy Thursday in central Mexico. killed eight state police officers and five prosecutors in a grenade fire, authorities said.
The massacre of 13 police officers in the state of Mexico was the largest murder of law enforcement in the country since October 2019, when cartel gunmen ambushed and killed 14 officers from state police to neighboring Michoacan state.
Thursday’s ambush sparked a huge search for the killers in a gang-ridden rural area southwest of Mexico City, which is surrounded on three sides by the state of Mexico. The dead police officers worked for the state.
Although the state of Mexico contains suburbs of the capital, it also includes lawless mountain lands and scrub like the one where the attack took place.
Rodrigo Martinez Celis, the head of the state’s Department of Public Safety, said soldiers, Marines and National Guard troops combed the area by land and from the air looking for the killers.
“The convoy was patrolling the region, precisely to fight criminal groups operating in the area,” Martinez Celis said. “This aggression is an attack on the Mexican government.
“We will respond with full force,” he added.
There was no immediate indication as to which band or poster the armed men might belong to. Several operate in the area of Coatepec Harinas, where the attack took place.
The city is close to a hot spring spa known as Ixtapan de la Sal, which is popular with Mexico City residents as a weekend getaway. But it is also relatively close to cities like Taxco, where authorities have reported activities of the Guerreros Unidos gang apparently allied with the Jalisco cartel and the Arcelia gang, dominated by the Michoacán Family criminal organization.
The attack appears to present a challenge to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has followed a strategy of not confronting drug cartels directly to prevent violence.