3 men gunned down at Mexican hospital
By IANSTuesday, October 12, 2010
Ciudad Juarez (Mexico), Oct 13 (IANS/EFE) Gunmen murdered three men at a hospital in Ciudad Juarez, the most violent city in Mexico, police said.
The killings occurred just after midnight Sunday at a public hospital in Ciudad Juarez, the city with the highest homicide rate in the Americas.
The body of one of the victims, an 18-year-old man, was found in the street in front of the hospital, while the other two men were chased into the emergency room by the gunmen and killed, a police spokesman told EFE.
Prosecutors did not identify the victims or provide a motive for the murders.
Ciudad Juarez is the scene of a war for control of smuggling routes into the US between the Juarez and Sinaloa drug cartels.
The border city, where more than 2,200 people have been murdered this year, has been plagued by drug-related violence for years.
The murder rate took off in the border city of 1.5 million people in 2007, when more than 800 people were killed, then it more than doubled to 1,623 in 2008, according to press tallies, with the number of killings soaring to 2,635 last year.
Ciudad Juarez, with 191 homicides per 100,000 residents, was the most violent city in the world in 2009, registering a higher murder rate than San Pedro Sula, San Salvador, Caracas and Guatemala, two Mexican non-governmental organizations said in a report released earlier this year.
–IANS/EFE
