By EFE,
Mexico City : Authorities in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua are investigating whether the people slain at a drug treatment centre in Ciudad Juarez belonged to a criminal group and were gunned down by a rival organisation.
The toll from the massacre has risen to 18, with another person dying since the initial report, a source in the state attorney general’s (AG) office told EFE, adding that two of the victims died at a hospital.
The massacre occurred Wednesday at the El Aliviane drug treatment centre, a facility that houses more than 50 people in the Bella Vista neighbourhood of Juarez, located across the border from El Paso, Texas.
Citing eyewitness accounts and initial evidence gathered at the crime scene, the sources in the AG’s office said a dozen people armed with AK-47 assault rifles went into the building and sprayed with gunfire a score of people who were holding a meeting.
The victims ranged in age from 18 to 30.
Investigators found “more than 83 bullet casings” at the crime scene, Chihuahua Public Safety Secretary Victor Valencia told MVS radio.
Officials are looking at several possible motives for the attack and investigating whether the people killed at El Aliviane had “links to an organised crime group”, Valencia said.
“It is supposed or assumed that the people who went there, the hitmen, belonged to another criminal group,” Valencia said. “This is one focus of the investigation.”
Valencia acknowledged that the attack “has undoubtedly impacted the families and society in general” in Chihuahua, a state he described as being plunged into “a crisis” of values rooted in “horrifying” behaviour.
Wednesday’s assault was the second attack this year on a drug treatment centre in Ciudad Juarez.
Gunmen killed five men and wounded three others June 1 at the Leyes de Reforma treatment centre.
So far this year, Juarez, considered Mexico’s deadliest city, has registered nearly 1,500 murders, accounting for some 30 percent of the nearly 5,000 killings reported between January and August nationwide.
A total of 302 people were murdered last month in Juarez, well above the 253 killings reported in all of 2006.
The murder rate took off in the border city of 1.5 million people in 2007, when more than 800 people were killed, then it more than doubled to 1,623 in 2008.
Mexican officials, who deployed 8,000 federal police and soldiers in the border metropolis months ago in an effort to reduce the violence, dealt some blows to organised crime groups in August, such as the arrests last weekend of four suspected members of the La Linea gang in connection with 211 murders.
The death toll has soared as gunmen working for rival drug cartels battle to gain control of the routes used for smuggling cocaine, marijuana, heroin and other drugs into the United States.