Seventeen Mexican drug gang members were killed near the US border yesterday during one of the deadliest shootouts in Mexico's three-year narco-war.
Rival factions of the Arellano Felix drug cartel in Tijuana on the Mexico-California border battled each other with rifles and machine guns in the early hours of the morning, police said.
Fourteen bodies were lying in pools of blood on a road on the city's eastern limits. The corpses were surrounded by hundreds of bullet casings.
A fifteenth body was found nearby. Two more men died in hospital yesterday evening, police said.
Six men were wounded and another six were arrested, but some gang members are thought to have escaped.
Two of the dead were believed to be senior hitmen for the Arellano Felix cartel and were identified by large gold rings on their fingers. The rings carried the icon of Saint Death, a ghoulish figure that gangsters believe protects them, police said.
"Today shows we are facing a terrible war never seen before on the border," Baja California Attorney General Rommel Moreno told a news conference.
Some 190 people have been killed in Tijuana so far this year. In 2007, there were more than 2,500 drug killings across Mexico and there have been more than 900 this year.
The Arellano Felix gang was long the dominant trafficking organization in Tijuana, smuggling drugs into California. Recently the group has been under attack from a rival gang from the Pacific state of Sinaloa, led by Mexico's most wanted man, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman.
President Felipe Calderon has sent thousands of troops to Tijuana and Baja California state since taking office in December 2006. Some 25,000 soldiers and federal police are deployed to fight cartels in drug hot spots across Mexico.