Monday 17 June 2013

Gangsters kill eight policemen in Guatemala, kidnap officer

Suspected gangsters launched an assault on a police station in western Guatemala on 13 June, killing eight policemen and kidnapping an officer; authorities began a massive search for the missing officer César Augusto García Cortez in the department of Quetzaltenango where the killing ocurred. Some 15 men in a convoy of three cars were said to have attacked the police station in Salcajá outside the Quetzaltenango city district. The area was described as on a drug route to Mexico and the attack was said to have followed the recent arrest by police of the bodyguard of a local trafficker, Europa Press reported on 14 June. The deputy-minister of Security Edi Suárez Prera deplored the crime on 14 June as "an act of vengence mainly by drug dealers" in response to the policemen's "positive" work against local crime "within a short time;" the next day he said authorities had identified the culprits, but gave no details, Guatemala's official news agency AGN reported. Guatemala's President Otto Pérez Molina separately announced on 14 June that more than 1,500 troops would soon help the National Police patrol 28 of the country's most crime-ridden districts, Europa Press reprted. The massacre was not the only crime reported in Guatemala in recent days. Three no less were reported killed on 16-17 June in the departments of Quezaltenango and San Marcos, including a 24-year-old man hacked to death and a 51-year-old woman who had her throat slit, the daily Prensa Libre reported. The daily Siglo.21 gave 2,597 that day as the number of reported homicides in Guatemala so far in 2013, without giving exact dates for the figure, with over 85.6 per cent of these implemented with guns. Its report on stated that police believed on the basis of many investigations that while criminals use "few arms to kill many," these seemed increasingly to alternate between killings and were perhaps hired not bought. A spokesman for the police laboratories INACIF said tests on 1,317 confiscated weapons showed that a gun might be used for between two and 38 murders.