Soldier, cop slain by gunmen in northern Mexico

Monterrey, Agency
A soldier and a police officer were killed and four other troops wounded in this northern Mexican metropolis, authorities said Friday.

The military fatalities resulted from an incident that began in the south Monterrey neighborhood of Cortijo de Rio when the drivers of two SUVs took off after soldiers ordered them to pull over, the Nuevo Leon state Attorney General's Office said.

The drivers headed north and on reaching the Colonia Caracol section of downtown, they turned onto a side street where a third vehicle rammed one of the military vehicles as the gunmen hurled a grenade and opened fire on the troops.

One soldier was killed and four others wounded, two of them seriously.

Three hours later, gunmen killed a police officer as he was sitting in a patrol car in the Monterrey suburb of Guadalupe.

Over the past week, drug cartel gunmen in Monterrey have taken to the streets every night to "hunt" cops or hurl grenades at police stations, leaving three officers and a civilian dead.

In Mexico's murder capital, Ciudad Juarez, a Texas National Guardsman and a civilian were killed and a third man wounded in another shooting incident.

The double homicide occurred Wednesday when the soldier was talking to two individuals outside a house on the south side of Juarez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, according to media accounts.

The state Attorney General's Office in Chihuahua, where Juarez is located, said the two men accompanying the guardsman were both Mexicans.

In a statement, the Texas National Guard identified the slain soldier as 22-year-old Pvt. First Class Jose Gil Hernandez Ramirez.

With Hernandez's death, at least six Americans have been slain in Ciudad Juarez this year; more than 20 U.S. citizens have been killed since January of last year, according to media tallies.

More than 2,300 murders have been committed in Juarez since the start of the year, an average of nine per day, according to the Chihuahua AG's office.

Elsewhere in the border region, five suspected cartel enforcers and three soldiers were killed in a clash in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, Mexico's defense department said.

The battle occurred Wednesday in a neighborhood of Nuevo Laredo, which lies across the border from Laredo, Texas, when soldiers repelled an attack by a group of armed men, the department said in a statement.

Tamaulipas, which is on the Gulf of Mexico, has been the scene for months of a bloody war between the Gulf and Los Zetas cartels for control smuggling routes into the United States.

Nationwide, drug-related violence in Mexico has left more than 28,000 people dead since late 2006, when President Felipe Calderon took office and militarized the fight against the cartels.