Police chief, 3 detectives gunned down in Mexico | World | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

More top law enforcement officers getting shot dead in Mexico. How sad for everyone involved.

MEXICO CITY — Gunmen killed a state police chief in the border city of Nogales and three police detectives in central Guanajuato state, as a wave of drug-related violence batters Mexican security forces, authorities said Monday.

In Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, authorities on Monday found the bullet-riddled bodies of six men in a vegetable warehouse along with more than 100 shell casings from assault rifles.

The bodies of three other men were found in a sport utility vehicle on a Tijuana street on Sunday. All had apparently been shot to death.

On Sunday night, Sonora state police chief Juan Manuel Pavon Felix was shot dead as he entered a hotel with his bodyguard and other officers, according to a statement from the state investigative police office.

Pavon had just finished directing police operations in the city, the statement said.

In Guanajuato, the state attorney general reported that gunmen killed three state police detectives on Monday at a restaurant near the border with the violence-plagued state of Michoacan, where drug cartels have been fighting bloody turf battles.

Scores of soldiers and police officers have been killed in escalating drug violence across Mexico.

On Monday, the government announced that a lawyer who has worked for the country's intelligence and national security agency, Rodrigo Esparza, has been named the new commissioner of federal police.

His predecessor, Gerardo Garay, resigned last week amid allegations that drug gangs have infiltrated senior levels of crime-fighting agencies.

Police chief, 3 detectives gunned down in Mexico | World | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle