CIUDAD JUAREZ – Three people connected to the US consulate in Mexico’s most violent border city were murdered, police said yesterday, prompting US president Barack Obama to respond with outrage and sadness.
Gunmen on Saturday killed an American couple associated with the consulate in Ciudad Juarez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, in broad daylight, a police source said.
The couple’s baby survived the attack, the source said.
Minutes later, another man with ties to the consulate was murdered in a different area of the city at the centre of a bloody turf war between drug cartels, according to the source.
Gunmen boxed in the third victim’s car with other vehicles and shot him, according to a media witness who saw the crime scene in the city where 8,000 troops and federal police have been deployed.
A consulate employee and her husband, both US citizens, along with the husband of another employee who is a Mexican citizen, were murdered, the White House said in a statement.
“The president is deeply saddened and outraged by the news,” White House national security council spokesman Mike Hammer said in a statement.
He added that Mr Obama “shares in the outrage of the Mexican people at the murders of thousands in Ciudad Juarez and elsewhere in Mexico.”
In an apparent reaction to the attacks, the US state department yesterday updated its warning on travel in Mexico to say that it had authorised the departure of dependants of US government personnel from US consulates in several northern Mexico border cities.
In Ciudad Juarez, one of the world’s deadliest cities, there are as many as a dozen drug murders a day and scenes of bullet-riddled vehicles and bodies lying in pools of blood are common on its streets.
Mexico’s drug war has killed some 18,600 people, mainly cartel members and police officers, since President Felipe Calderon took power and launched an army crackdown on traffickers in late 2006. The rampant violence worries Washington as well as foreign investors.
White House spokesman Mr Hammer said the United States would continue to work with Mr Calderon’s government “to break the power” of drug trafficking organisations.
The consulate in Ciudad Juarez and US embassy in Mexico City could not immediately provide more details about the killings.
– (Reuters)