Hourly Update

Body found in wake of attack by cartels in northern Mexico

ARIZPE, Mexico - Police and Mexican army troops found a body in the search Friday for members of a drug cartel assault force that overran a town near the Arizona border and killed seven people, including five police officers. Wednesday's invasion of Cananea by a heavily armed caravan showed the brashness and power of Mexico's ruthless organized crime gangs. After the attack on Cananea, about 50 assailants, pursued by police and army troops, fled to the hills, ditched their vehicles, commandeered horses and forced ranch hands to serve as guides, according to an account from a man abducted by the armed gang. Sixteen assailants, including the one whose body was found Friday, were killed in the ensuing gunbattles in the rugged desert mountains outside Arizpe, 60 miles south of the U.S. border. Authorities say they have arrested four suspects. Mexico is struggling to tame drug gangs responsible for a recent spate of executions, and has sent thousands of police and army troops to several states. The nation's top police official said Thursday that drug gangs are relying on a flow of arms from the United States and using terrorist strategies learned from al-Qaida to hit back at the government. Mexican Federal Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna complained of "a large flow of weapons ... many of which came from the United States," noting authorities have seized assault rifles, .50-caliber machine guns and hand grenades from the gangs. "Just in the U.S. border zone, just over the bridge, there are 6,000 gun shops," Garcia Luna said. "That represents an opportunity for drug traffickers." Meanwhile, the leader of a state investigative police team was shot and died Friday in Hermosillo, the Sonora state capital about 200 miles south of Cananea. Jose Larrinaga, a spokesman for the state attorney general, said their was no information connecting the killing with the violence in Cananea and Arizpe. But the news of another police killing weighed on officers searching the desert for the Cananea assailants. "We don't know what's going to happen next, what reprisals can happen," said an officer, who asked his name not be published out of safety concerns.