Mexico City police chief shot in assassination bid
MEXICO CITY • Mexico City’s chief of police was shot and injured and two of his bodyguards killed in a dramatic assassination attempt early on Friday that he quickly blamed on one of Mexico’s most powerful drug gangs, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG).
The city’s public security chief Omar Garcia Harfuch suffered three bullet wounds as he and bodyguards came under heavy fire around dawn in an upscale Mexico City neighbourhood, where the attack was captured on security cameras.
Some three hours later, apparently from his hospital bed, Garcia sent out a message on Twitter blaming his injuries and the death of two bodyguards on a “cowardly attack” by the CJNG, a gang notorious as one of the most violent in Mexico.
A third person, a woman apparently on her way to work, was also killed in the gunfire. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said the attack showed that authorities were putting pressure on criminal gangs in the capital, which has rarely witnessed such brazen outbreaks of violence.
“There will be no turning back,” Sheinbaum told a news conference.
Grainy security camera footage broadcast on Mexican television showed a group of heavily armed men in an open-backed truck disguised as a work vehicle, and an SUV blocking off a road to open fire on Garcia’s automobile.
Garcia was wounded in the shoulder, collarbone and the knee, Security Minister Alfonso Durazo said.
The assassination attempt served as a warning that “nobody is off limits,” said Gladys Mccormick, a security analyst at Syracuse University in New York.