By Gustavo Ruiz and Martin Duran
Associated Press
MORELIA, Mexico — Three gunmen were killed in a shootout with police after more than 40 armed assailants lobbed grenades at a federal police station, authorities in western Mexico said Saturday.
The Michoacan state prosecutor’s office said three police officers were seriously injured and two gunmen detained in the attack, which left gaping holes in the building from three grenade explosions and thousands of gunshots.
The assailants pulled up in more than 10 vehicles early Saturday in the city of La Piedad, prosecutors said in a statement.
Michoacan has been the main stomping grounds of the La Familia cartel. The criminal organization is battling a splinter group known as The Knights Templar and a weakening in its ranks after La Familia’s leader was captured last month.
Also Saturday, a priest in the northern border state of Tamaulipas was killed in his car by a stray bullet during a shootout in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, said the city’s Public Security Secretary Gabriel Lopez Ordaz.
The Diocese of Matamoros expressed in a statement its “profound dismay” at the death of Marco Antonio Duran Romero of the San Roberto Belarmino Church.
The Zetas and rival Gulf Cartel are fighting in Tamaulipas over lucrative drug transit routes to the United States.
In the western state of Sinaloa, the bodies of two decapitated men were left at the entrance of two local newspaper offices, Noreste and El Debate, said an official with the state prosecutor’s office.
In October, both offices, based in the port city of Mazatlan, were attacked by gunfire from drug traffickers. Newspapers and their reporters have been targeted in states where cartels are fighting for control of drug territory.
The powerful Sinaloa Cartel has been clashing over drug turf against an alliance of the Zetas and Beltran Leyva drug gangs in Mazatlan.
The Sinaloa official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk on the record.
Copyright 2011 Associated Press