US car target of Mexico CIA attack
A senior US official says there is strong circumstantial evidence that Mexican federal police who fired on a US Embassy vehicle were working for organised crime on a assassination attempt.
A senior US official says there is strong circumstantial evidence that Mexican federal police who fired on a US Embassy vehicle, wounding two CIA officers, were working for organised crime on a targeted assassination attempt.
Meanwhile, a Mexican official with knowledge of the case on the August 24 ambush confirmed on Tuesday that prosecutors are investigating whether the Beltran Leyva Cartel was behind the attack.
The Mexican official said that is among several lines of investigation into the shooting up of an armoured SUV that was clearly marked with diplomatic licence plates on a rural road near Cuernavaca south of Mexico City. Federal police, at times battered by allegations of infiltration and corruption by drug cartels, have said the shooting was a case of mistaken identity as officers were looking into the kidnapping of a government employee in that area.
“That’s not a ‘We’re trying to shake down a couple people for a traffic violation sort of operation. That’s a ‘We are specifically trying to kill the people in this vehicle’,” a US official familiar with the investigation told reporters. “This is not a ‘Whoops, we got the wrong people.’”
Photos of the gray Toyota SUV, a model known to be used by Drug Enforcement Administration agents and other US Embassy employees working in Mexico, showed it riddled with heavy gunfire. The US Embassy called the attack an “ambush”.
When asked if the Mexican federal police officers involved in the shooting were tied to organised crime, the US official said, “The circumstantial evidence is pretty damn strong.”