No. 2 police officer in northern Mexican city shot dead at son’s elementary school

Mexico deputy police chief slain at son’s school

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — Mexican authorities said Thursday that gunmen killed a deputy police chief outside an elementary school as his wife, son and other students and parents looked on.

Eduardo Ezparza, the spokesman for prosecutors in northern Chihuahua state, said the shooting occurred Wednesday in the state capital, also named Chihuahua.

City police coordinator Antonio Olague, 39, was dropping his 8-year-old son off at school when assailants in a car opened fire. Olague was hit by eight bullets.

Police had no suspects. Police spokesman Jesus Reyes said Olague was on the force for almost 20 years and received some training in the United States. He was second-in-command of the city police force.

Chihuahua is the worst-hit region in Mexico’s brutal drug gang violence.

Elsewhere, police in the border city of Tijuana arrested four men Thursday on suspicion links to a plot to kill the police chief there, Julian Leyzaola.

Authorities said the four men were detained with five assault rifles. They said tests confirmed one rifle was the same weapon used in a shootout in which gunmen disguised their vehicles as Mexican army units in a bid to kill Leyzaola, who has become known for his tough stance in cracking down on police corruption and gangs in Tijuana.

The four are believed to have worked for Teodoro “El Teo” Garcia Simental, the Tijuana drug gang leader captured Jan. 12 in Baja California.

Cartels have killed dozens of police and government officials in reaction to a frontal assault by thousands of troops and federal police deployed across Mexico.

In Michoacan, another state hit hard by drug gang battles, police on Thursday found the tortured, half-burned bodies of two men who had apparently been killed by some chemical substance injected into their veins.

The bodies were found dumped on different streets in Morelia, the Michoacan state capital.

Also Thursday, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City announced that the U.S. government has named seven leaders of the Michoacan-based La Familia cartel as “specially designated narcotics traffickers,” a move that prohibits U.S. citizens and firms from having any business dealings with them and freezes any U.S. assets they may have.

Those designated under the so-called “Kingpin Act” include the cartel’s alleged leader, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez.

Farther to the south, in the Pacific coast state of Oaxaca, police reported finding a man’s severed head in a plastic cooler, along with a handwritten message saying, “This is what is going to happen to all the kidnappers, rapists and those who jump ship.” It was the kind of message frequently left by drug gangs.

Earlier this week, another severed head was found inside a backpack in the same region, with the message reading: “This is what is going to happen to all the pushers and buyers who don’t obey us.” That message was signed “Respectfully, The Zetas,” referring to a gang of hit men allied with the Gulf cartel.

In the neighboring state of Guerrero, a man’s severed head was left in a plastic bag outside a grade school in Chilpancingo, the state capital. A message was left with the head, but police did not reveal its contents.