http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N07169426.htm

Four police dead in shootout in Mexico border city
07 Mar 2006 19:12:47 GMT

Source: Reuters

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico, March 7 (Reuters) - Suspected drug hit men on Tuesday killed four policemen in a shootout in this crime-ridden Mexican city on the U.S. border, police and witnesses said.

One of the dead was the second-in-charge of a state police force sent to Nuevo Laredo last year by President Vicente Fox's government to help end a drug feud, the sources said.

The killings took place in broad daylight on a busy highway leading to the airport in Nuevo Laredo, across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Texas.

The policemen and their attackers fought for 15 minutes in a shootout that spilled over into an auto dealership and left bodies strewn on the ground.

"There are a bunch of people wounded," a witness said.

More than 40 people have been killed in Nuevo Laredo this year in a struggle over smuggling routes between the local Gulf cartel and an alliance of drug traffickers from the western state of Sinaloa.