Gunmen kill nine near Mexican border city

Mexico City, Sep 24 (IANS/EFE) Gunmen killed nine people, including a girl, at a house on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez, a border city in northern Mexico, officials said Monday.

The attack occurred around 10 p.m. Sunday while several people were celebrating a win by a baseball team at a house in Loma Blanca, a town outside Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua state attorney general's office spokesperson Carlos Gonzalez said.

"At this time, investigators have registered the deaths of eight men and a six-year-old girl, as well as other people who were wounded," Gonzalez said, without identifying the victims.

The victims' bodies lay strewn in the yard of the house next to the trophy the men had won playing baseball Sunday, sources close to the victims said.

Chihuahua, which borders the US, is one of the most violent states in Mexico.

Several drug cartels, including the Juarez, Sinaloa and Zetas organisations, operate in Chihuahua.

Alberto Carrillo Fuentes, considered the leader of the new Juarez cartel and blamed by officials for much of the violence in Chihuahua and Sinaloa states, was arrested in August in the western state of Nayarit.

He is the brother of Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, the top leader of the Juarez cartel, and Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who founded the criminal organisation in 1993.

Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who was known as the "Lord of the Skies" for his fleet of aircraft, died in 1997 after undergoing plastic surgery to disguise his identity.

Amado's brother, Vicente, and his son, Vicente Carrillo Leyva, who was arrested in April 2009, took control of the cartel following the drug lord's death.

The Juarez cartel, one of Mexico's most violent criminal organisations, has been waging a war against the Sinaloa cartel that has left thousands of people dead in the past few years.

The cartel smuggles drugs and engages in other criminal activities from its base in Ciudad Juarez, located across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas.

--IANS/EFE

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