EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – The bloody repercussions of an alleged abduction whose principals were briefly jailed in El Paso last year continue to reverberate south of the border.
Nine suspected members of Los Mayitos gang were killed and another five wounded during an armed incursion by a rival group into a drug rehab clinic in Culiacan, Mexican Public Safety Secretary Omar Garcia Harfuch said on Tuesday.
“They went inside this rehabilitation center, Shaddai … there are nine adult males dead. The preliminary information is that it was a cell of Los Chapitos attacking a cell of their rivals, Los Mayos,” Harfuch said in an online broadcast.
He said the assailants’ vehicles have been identified and a search is on for the killers.
“They came, they asked if they belonged to a certain group – I imagine nobody volunteered to say they did. What they did then was to open fire,” Sinaloa Gov. Ruben Rocha Moya said told reporters in Culiacan.
Eight men died on the scene and one more in a hospital, he said.
“This is not the only case. We have seven centers that have been attacked in this war between the groups […] This has been the most violent one,” Rocha said.
The war between Los Chapitos – the sons of jailed Sinaloa cartel drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera – and the forces of Ismael Zambada Sicairos, aka “Mayito Flaco,” has been raging since September in western Mexico following the abduction of Zambada’s father.
Joaquin Guzman Lopez on July 25 allegedly tricked his father’s former business partner into a meeting but instead abducted and flew him on a fraudulently registered airplane to Santa Teresa, New Mexico. The son of “El Chapo” then turned himself over to U.S. authorities as agents went into the plane to arrest Sinaloa cartel cofounder Ismael Mario “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia.
Guzman Lopez was detained in El Paso before being flown to face drug charges in Chicago overnight. El Mayo remained in custody in El Paso through Sept. 12. He made a handful of appearances in El Paso federal court before being flown to New York to face prior drug charges. He has pleaded not guilty.
Zambada’s Dallas lawyer told KTSM his client was tricked, kidnapped and brought to the U.S. against his will by his former partner’s son.
The Mexico City daily El Universal reported last month the conflict between Los Chapitos and Los Mayitos has left more than 900 people dead and more than 1,200 missing.