Unidentified assailants abducted and killed four police officers and three civilians in Mexico’s Sinaloa state, in fatal suspected drug crimes, local officials said on Monday.
“Unfortunately we have had four town police and three civilians murdered” late Sunday in Agua Verde, said Edgar Gonzalez, mayor of El Rosario in which Agua Verde is located in the northwestern state.
State prosecutors said the dead were kidnapped late Sunday and that their bodies were found early Monday, along with 90 spent gun shells and four burned out vehicles, three of them belonging to police.
Authorities did not immediately give a motive. Sinaloa is home to organized crime rings including the cartel led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Mexico’s and the United
States’ most wanted man.
Former president Felipe Calderon deployed the military to battle the country’s increasingly powerful and brutal drug cartels in 2006, leading to an escalation in violence that has claimed the lives of more than 70,000 people since then.
