Spasms of violence kill 20, including 5 cops, in Sonora
by The Associated Press on May. 17, 2007, under Local, Nation/World, SpecialPolice killed 15 armed assailants in a fierce gun battle south of the Arizona border Wednesday after tracking a group of gunmen who killed five policemen in Sonora.
About 40 assailants, whose tactics and weaponry resembled those of Mexico’s powerful drug gangs, drove into Cananea, 20 miles south of the U.S. border, Wednesday in up to 15 vehicles and snatched four officers from two patrol cars, Sonora police said. The city is about 100 miles south of Tucson and is southeast of Nogales.
The bullet-riddled bodies of the police, along with 50 spent cartridges, were found on the side of a road hours later, police said.
Sonora state Gov. Eduardo Bours said five policeman in all died in the day’s fighting. He did not specify how the fifth officer died.
Three other officers were kidnapped elsewhere. Two were released earlier in the day, and one was freed during the later gun battle. Three Cananea residents who were also aducted were freed.
After the initial attack on Cananea, the gunmen fled and tried to hole up in mountainous terrain around the town of Arizpe, about 50 miles to the south. Police followed the assailants there and killed 15 of them in a shootout, Bours said. Police seized assault rifles and pistols after the battle, the Sonora government said.
Meanwhile, in Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora, unidentified assailants on Wednesday tossed a hand grenade from a passing car at the offices of the newspaper Cambio. The device caused minor damage and no injuries. A similar attack on the newspaper occurred in April.
Authorities in the northern state of Coahuila reported that men disguised as Mexican federal agents abducted the state’s chief anti-kidnapping investigator. Lucio Tello, a spokesman for the state attorney general, said Enrique Ruiz Arevalo, director for investigations of organized crime for the agency, has been missing since Monday.
