Gunmen kidnapped and killed three police officers in Michoacan, a western Mexican state where thousands of federal troops were deployed last month to confront a violent drug cartel, officials said.
The state's top prosecutor, Placido Torres Pineda, told AFP that the bodies of the officers from the town of Tancitaro were discovered near Buenavista, a community that formed a vigilante militia to combat the Knights Templar cartel.
The three officers were on patrol when they were ambushed by heavily armed men who disarmed them and whisked them away yesterday.
In the neighboring state of Guerrero, a senior Acapulco police officer was killed by three gunmen as he was having dinner in an eatery in a neighborhood of the Pacific resort, prosecutors said.
More than 70,000 people have died in drug-related violence since 2006, when then-president Felipe Calderon deployed troops across the nation to combat drug cartels.
President Enrique Pena Nieto, who took office in December, has vowed to reduce the levels of violence by refocusing the security strategy toward crime prevention programs, but he said troops would stay on the ground until the wave of murders is under control.
