Geo 436 MORELIA: Gunmen ambushed the motorcade of the top state security official in the Mexican state of Michoacan early Saturday in the latest round of drug-related violence that left 13 people dead around the country. The assailants opened fire with AK-47 assault rifles and detonated fragmentation grenades in the attack, killing four people and wounding 11 others, including the Michoacan state security secretary, Minerva Bautista. “A trailer blocked the path of the vans in which Minerva Bautista and her security team were traveling, and in an instant, an armed group opened fire on all the secretary’’s people, without a care for civilian passersby,” state prosecutor Jesus Montejano Ramirez said. Two bodyguards and two civilians were killed in the onslaught. Bautista was hit with a grenade fragment and taken to a local hospital where she was in stable condition, the state government said. Meanwhile, army troops clashed with suspected drug gangs in towns on the outskirts of the northern city of Monterrey, leaving six people dead and a soldier injured, the Mexican defense ministry said. Gunmen attacked an army patrol in the municipality of Juarez, which adjoins Monterrey, and blocked the main avenues with two police cars to keep reinforcements from arriving, it said. The defense ministry said five “presumed criminals” were killed in the shoot-out. A short time earlier in the outlying Monterrey district of San Nicolas, soldiers killed a man fleeing a checkpoint in a car, the defense ministry said. Monterrey has been the scene of a bloody turf war between the Gulf drug cartel and its former allies, Los Zetas. Since 2006, more than 22,700 people have been killed in Mexico’’s spiraling drug violence despite the deployment of some 50,000 troops to provide security in cities ravaged by killings. In the western resort city of Acapulco, the dismembered bodies of three men were found Saturday stuffed in black plastic garbage backs and left in a house with a message to a rival drug gang, the Guerrero state security office said. Drug violence has spiked in recent weeks in Acapulco as competing factions fight for control of the organization headed by Arturo Beltran Leyva, a cartel leader killed in December.
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