Free Republic

MEXICO CITY -- Mexican prosecutors say guards at a prison let inmates out and lent them guns to massacre 17 people at a party, then allowed them to return to their cells. Sunday's announcement from the federal attorney general's office represents a shocking revelation about the July 18 shooting in the northern city of Torreon, where the victims included women and children. The director and two other officials at the prison in Durango state have been put under a form of house arrest while investigations continue. Prosecution spokesman Ricardo Najera says there is evidence the director has given inmates permission...

A drug gang kidnapped and killed six people near a town in the US-Mexican border region, prompting a series of gunbattles with soldiers that left 15 others dead. The violence on Tuesday started when gunmen kidnapped nine alleged members of a rival drug gang in Villa Ahumada and later executed six of them along the PanAmerican highway outside of the town, 130km south of Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, said Enrique Torres, spokesman for a joint military-police operation in Chihuahua State. Assailants later released three of the men, although their whereabouts was not immediately known, Torres...