Posted on 05/16/2008 2:33:18 PM PDT by SwinneySwitch
MONTERREY, Mexico - Suspected Mexican drug hit men dumped the head of a murdered man on top of a car in the street, police said on Friday, in a rare outrage in the wealthy city of Monterrey.
The head, found on Thursday night on the roof of a car parked in a middle-class residential area, had a written message next to it signed by the Gulf cartel, the country's most violent drug organization.
The ears were chopped off, a senior state police officer told reporters on condition of anonymity.
Mexican drug gangs, engaged in a bitter fight with each other and security forces, often behead opponents to scare rival traffickers but this was the first such decapitation in Monterrey, home to large corporations and a wealthy business elite.
The message, written on cardboard or paper, suggested the victim may have been a common criminal who had passed himself off as a member of the Gulf cartel's feared Zetas hit squad.
"This is what happens to people who want to pass for Zetas," the message read, according to El Norte newspaper. The man's body has not been found, police sources said.
In Ciudad Juarez across the border from El Paso, Texas, drug hit men killed two rivals in a hospital near the city's main military base on Friday, police and doctors said.
The gunmen entered the private Hospital Juarez and shot the men in the waiting room in front of doctors and nurses. The two men had brought in two seriously wounded partners, fleeing from a gunbattle.
"It happened at 2.30 a.m. and we called the police, but no one came until 7 in the morning," said a hospital nurse who declined to be named.
President Felipe Calderon has sent 25,000 troops and federal police to fight cartels across Mexico since 2006 -- including 2,500 troops to Ciudad Juarez in March and more than 2,700 this week to Sinaloa, the home state of kingpin Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, Mexico's most wanted man.
Despite those efforts, six high-ranking police officers were killed in the past two weeks.
Drug violence has killed more than 1,100 people in Mexico this year.
(Reporting by Gabriela Lopez in Monterrey and Ignacio Alvarado in Ciudad Juarez; editing by Mohammad Zargham)
Ping!
If you want on, or off this S. Texas/Mexico ping list, please FReepMail me.
Smart girl.
Beheading ping.
And, if we don’t quickly secure the border, comingsoon to an American city near you.
My what a lovely place.
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