Mexico City: Gunmen apparently from a drug gang ambushed a police convoy Thursday in central Mexico. killing eight state police officers and five prosecution investigators in a hail of gunfire, authorities said.
The massacre of the 13 law enforcement officers in the State of Mexico was the country’s single biggest slaying of law enforcement since October 2019, when cartel gunmen ambushed and killed 14 state police officers in the neighboring state of Michoacan.
Rodrigo Martínez Celis, the head of the state Public Safety Department, said soldiers, marines and National Guard troops were combing the area by land and from the air looking for the killers.
“The convoy was carrying out patrols in the region, precisely to fight the criminal groups that operate in the area,” Martínez Celis said. “This aggression is an attack on the Mexican government.
“We will respond with all force,” he added.
There was no immediate indication as to what gang or cartel the gunmen might have belonged to.
The attack appears to present a challenge for President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has pursued a strategy of not directly confronting drug cartels in an effort to avoid violence.