Dozens reported killed around Mexico

The webpage Valor por Tamaulipas, run by anonymous users and which monitors violent crime in Mexico's north-eastern Tamaulipas state, claimed that 50 people - most of whom may have been gangsters - were killed in gun battles between "armed civilians" in the city of Reynosa on 10 March and later. With these, some 60 were reported to have died in presumed criminal incidents or were found dead around Mexico on 10-12 March. Valor por Tamaulipas rejected the authorities' count of two deaths in the shootout and observed they omitted to count "dozens" of bodies thrown into one or more ditches in the district, Proceso reported on 12 March. The review reported continuing "movements" by armed groups that day. The shootout was attributed to rivalry between factions of the Gulf Cartel in Reynosa. Authorities separately found on 12 March seven bodies - of possible victims of drug cartels - left in clandestine graves in the northern and north-western states of Chihuahua and Sonora, Proceso reported. A spokesman for the Chihuahua state prosecutor's office said police believe the four found buried outside the district of  Rosales in Chihuahua may have been killed by gunmen linked to the Sinaloa Cartel headed by Joaquín Guzmán Loera. He said more bodies may be found. The grave was located after police questioned 11 suspected drug dealers and gunmen, detained in the state at an unspecified date. On 10 March the army arrested four police officers and a traffic policeman of Rosales, these being suspected of having ties to the Sinaloa Cartel, Proceso reported. Also, the police chief of the district of Tarímbaro in the western state of Michoacán was kidnapped on 10 or 11 March, then beaten and shot to death; his body was found elsewhere in Michoacán, Proceso cited the mayor of Tarímbaro as saying. Four people were in turn shot dead in the western resort of Acapulco on 11 March: three in a parked minibus, and another in an Internet café he owned, Proceso reported.