Officials: 4 Americans kidnapped after going to Mexico to buy meds
CIUDAD VICTORIA, Mexico — Gunmen kidnapped four U.S. citizens who crossed into Mexico from Texas last week to buy medicine but were caught in a shootout that killed at least one Mexican citizen, U.S. and Mexican officials said Monday.
The four were in a white minivan with North Carolina license plates.
The group came under fire Friday shortly after entering the city of Matamoros from Brownsville, the southernmost tip of Texas near the Gulf coast, the FBI said in a statement Sunday.
“All four Americans were placed in a vehicle and taken from the scene by armed men,” the FBI said.
The bureau is offering a $50,000 reward for the victims’ return and the arrest of the kidnappers.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Monday the four were going to buy medicine, “there was a confrontation between groups, and they were detained,” without offering details.
A woman driving in Matamoros witnessed what appeared to be the shooting and abduction in broad daylight. She asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal.
The scene illustrates the terror that has prevailed for years in Matamoros, a city dominated by factions of the Gulf cartel who often fight among themselves. Amid the violence, thousands of Mexicans have disappeared in Tamaulipas state, where Matamoros is located.
The woman said she saw the white minivan get hit by another vehicle near an intersection, then gunfire rang out.
Another SUV rolled up and several armed men hopped out.
“All of a sudden they (the gunmen) were in front of us,” she said. “I entered a state of shock, nobody honked their horn, nobody moved. Everybody must have been thinking the same thing, ‘if we move they will see us, or they might shoot us.’ ”
She said the gunmen forced a woman, who was able to walk, into the back of a pickup truck.
Another person was carried to the truck but could still move his head.
“The other two they dragged across the pavement, we don’t know if they were alive or dead,” she said.
Mexican authorities arrived minutes later.
A video posted to social media Friday shows men with assault rifles and tan body armor loading the four people into the bed of a white pickup. One is alive and sitting up, but the others seemed either dead or wounded.
Turkey elections: A six-party alliance Monday nominated main opposition party leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu as its common candidate to challenge President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in elections in May, ending months of uncertainty and bickering that had frustrated their supporters.
The alliance tapped the leader of the pro-secular, center-left Republican People’s Party, or CHP, hours after a key member of the grouping — who had rejected Kilicdaroglu’s candidacy — agreed to a compromise solution and returned to the coalition.
Turkey is headed toward pivotal presidential and general elections May 14 that could shift the country toward a more democratic course or extend Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian rule into a third decade. Belarus ruling: A court in Belarus on Monday
sentenced exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya to 15 years in prison after a trial in absentia on charges including conspiring to overthrow the government, the latest move in a monthslong effort by the Belarusian government to suppress dissent.
Tsikhanouskaya ran against authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko in August 2020, an election that handed him his sixth term in office and was widely seen as rigged.
She called her conviction and sentence an act of vengeance by Belarusian authorities and vowed to continue to “fight for freedom.”
The results of the vote triggered the largest protests in the country’s history.
Lukashenko unleashed a brutal crackdown on demonstrators, accusing the opposition of plotting to overthrow the government, and Tsikhnouskaya left to Lithuania under pressure.
Other key politicians and activists were either
arrested or pressured to leave the country. Pakistan bomber: A suicide bomber on a motorcycle Monday rammed a police truck in Pakistan’s restive southwest, killing 10 police officers and wounding 12 in one of the deadliest attacks on security forces in recent months, authorities said.
The newly formed Tehreek-e-Jihad militant group hours later in a statement claimed responsibility for the attack, which took place on a bridge in the Sibi district of Baluchistan province.
Small Baluchistan-based separatist groups and local militants have been blamed for previous such attacks.
Late on Monday night, the Islamic State group also claimed responsibility for the attack.
It said in a statement released by the group’s Amaq news agency that IS militant Abdul Rahman al-Pakistani was driving a bomb-laden motorcycle that he ignited, killing or wounding
24 police.
Mahmood Notenzai, a local police chief, said the officers were on a routine patrol when the attack happened, initially killing nine. The casualties were taken to a nearby hospital, where one of the critically wounded policemen later died, he added.
Concert stampede in NY:
Unfounded fears of gunfire at a rap concert in Rochester, New York, sent a crowd rushing toward the exits in a stampede that killed one person and left two others fighting for their lives, authorities said.
The Memphis rap stars GloRilla and Finesse2tymes had finished performing Sunday night at Rochester’s Main Street Armory when people exiting just after 11 p.m. began to surge dangerously, police Chief David M. Smith said at a news briefing Monday.
“We do not have any evidence of gunshots being fired or of anyone being shot or stabbed at the scene,”
Smith said.
Police found three badly injured women in the auditorium. One, identified as Rhondesia Belton, 33, of Buffalo, died at a hospital.
The others, both 35, from Rochester and Syracuse, were in critical condition Monday, police said.
Notre Dame reconstruction:
The reconstruction of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris is going fast enough to allow its reopening to visitors and faithful at the end of 2024, less than six years after a fire ravaged its roof, French officials said Monday.
The cathedral’s iconic spire, which collapsed in the blaze, will gradually start reappearing above the monument this year in a powerful signal of its revival, the army general in charge of the colossal project, Gen. Jean-Louis Georgelin, said.
“The return of the spire in Paris’ sky will in my opinion be the symbol that we are winning the battle of Notre Dame,” he told The Associated Press.