Mexico, Dec 23: Drug gang hitmen shot dead the grieving mother, brother, sister and aunt of an elite Mexican marine who died after taking part in a raid that killed a notorious drug lord, police said on Tuesday.
Gunmen burst into the family’s home in Quintin Arauz in the southern state of Tabasco just before midnight on Monday, firing assault rifles. It appeared to be a revenge attack for a Mexican navy operation last week that killed Arturo Beltran Leyva, the boss of a major drug cartel.
“They broke the door down with a sledgehammer and sprayed them with bullets in the living room and bedrooms,” said Saturnino Dominguez, the local deputy police commander.
A fifth family member was injured in the attack.
The strike that killed Beltran Leyva was a victory for President Felipe Calderon and his flagging drug war, but it could spur revenge attacks and fan fresh violence as rival cartels seek to take over territory from the drug lord’s weakened cartel.
Elsewhere in Mexico, suspected cartel hitmen fired at four houses in different locations around the Pacific port of Mazatlan on Tuesday, although no casualties were reported, a spokesman for the Sinaloa state prosecutor’s office said.
In separate attacks, hitmen shot dead the tourism secretary in the drug violence-plagued western state of Sinaloa and another gang opened fire on a restaurant in the northern border city of Piedras Negras where the state prosecutor was eating with other government officials and a U.S. mayor from the state of Texas, Mexican media said.
–Agencies