Thread: Mexican gunman fires across border!

Mexican gunman fires
across border toward U.S.
highway workers

by Adriana Gómez Licón / El Paso Times

Posted: 01/14/2011 12:00:00 AM MST

FORT QUITMAN, Texas -- At least one Mexican
gunman fired a high-powered rifle across the
border at four U.S. road workers Thursday in an
isolated ghost town east of Fort Hancock,
Hudspeth County sheriff's officials said.

The bullets did not injure the four men.

Mike Doyle, chief deputy of the Hudspeth County
Sheriff's Office, said a rancher spotted a white
pickup fleeing the area on the Mexican side at
10:30 a.m. -- the time the shots were fired.

The bullets stuck private land along the unpaved
Indian Hot Springs Road, which is about half a
mile from the border fence. Hudspeth County
borrowed the land to store gravel and rocks used
for road construction. The workers were filling a
hole left last year by rainstorm damage.

The ghost town of Fort Quitman is 25 miles east
of Fort Hancock and 80 miles southeast of El
Paso. Fewer than a dozen ranchers raise cattle in
the remote area.

Doyle said the gunman might have shot at the
road workers to distract them or get them to
flee.

"Maybe they were trying to get them outside this
area," he said.

Doyle said the sheriff and the Texas Rangers at
this point are assuming the bullets were fired
from Mexico. He said one of the county workers
said he heard eight shots that "sounded like
high-powered rifles."

On the Mexican side, the nearest community is
Banderas, but there are roads that connect to
Ojinaga, right across from Presidio, and also to
Juárez.

Two Texas Rangers and Hudspeth County Sheriff
Arvin West and

Deputy Doyle later were at the scene looking for
the bullets with a metal detector.

Drug cartels use this busy smuggling corridor in
between the Quitman Mountains and mountains
in the northwestern part of Chihuahua state to
traffic marijuana and sometimes cocaine, Doyle
said.

The U.S. government built narrowly spaced steel
poles north of the Rio Grande to fence the border
in that West Texas area. The slots are not wide
enough for people to cross, but small objects can
fit between the 15-foot-tall poles.

"You can walk up and stick your gun through,"
West said. The river where it separates Fort
Quitman from Mexico is only a few feet wide.

http://www.elpasotimes.com/newupdated/c ... d=13261724

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