Four police officers and eight suspected criminals died in an armed confrontation on the outskirts of the Mexican city of Guadalajara, local authorities reported Thursday.
An initial balance of the Prosecutor’s Office reported four policemen and six gunmen dead, but the governor of the state of Jalisco, Enrique Alfaro, confirmed that two other aggressors died and three were seriously injured.
The crash occurred on Wednesday night in a house in the municipality of The jump and —according to witnesses— it lasted for more than an hour.
In the midst of the shooting, two people who remained kidnapped inside the building were rescued, Jalisco prosecutor Luis Méndez Ruiz told reporters.
The senior official explained that police responded to an emergency call alerting about armed men who had lowered gagged people from a truck in that house located on the outskirts of Guadalajara, capital of Jalisco.
The agents who went to the scene were received by a woman who stated that it was a false report, after which the patrol was attacked with gunfire.
Méndez explained that in the same place, hours before the attack, an operation was carried out by the Prosecutor’s Office specialized in cases of forced disappearance, but he did not confirm if the rescued correspond to the records of that search procedure.
The bodies of the alleged attackers killed, including a woman, were later found in two houses.
After the shooting, eight people were arrested and long weapons and ammunition were also seized.
According to official data, so far this year ten police officers have been murdered in Jalisco, one of the six states that concentrate 48% of the homicides committed in the country, most of them linked to organized crime.
That region, one of the most prosperous in Mexico, is also the cradle of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the most powerful drug trafficking group in the country and responsible for numerous deaths and disappearances in the region, according to local authorities.
Its leader, Nemesio Oseguera, alias “El Mencho”, is one of the most wanted capos by the United States authorities, who offer a reward of 10 million dollars for his capture.
Since 2006, when the then government militarized the anti-drug fight, Mexico has accumulated more than 340,000 murders.