Fourteen killed in Mexico drug battle on U.S. border

Sat Apr 26, 2008 9:54am EDT

TIJUANA, Mexico (Reuters) - Fourteen Mexican drug gang members were killed and eight others were injured in a gun battle near the U.S. border on Saturday, one of the bloodiest shootouts in Mexico's three-year-long narco-war.

Rival factions of the local Arellano Felix drug cartel in Tijuana on the Mexico-California border fought each other with rifles and machine guns in the early hours of the morning, police said.

The bodies lay in pools of blood, strewn along a road on the city's eastern limits, surrounded by hundreds of bullet casings. Many of the victims' faces were destroyed.

"By the way this happened and the guns used, we believe the men are from the same cartel, the Arellano Felix gang," said a senior police officer in Tijuana who declined to be named.

Two men were arrested but the remaining survivors escaped, the officer said.

The Arellano Felix gang was long the dominant drug-trafficking organization in Tijuana, smuggling drugs into California. Recently the group has been under attack from a rival gang from the Pacific state of Sinaloa, led by Mexico's most wanted man, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman.

Some 190 people have been killed in Tijuana so far this year, as the military steps in to try to quell the violence.

President Felipe Calderon has been locked in a war with the drug cartels since taking office in December 2006, sending some 25,000 soldiers and federal police to fight cartels in drug hot spots across Mexico.

Last year, there were more than 2,500 drug killings and there have been more than 900 this year.

(Reporting by Lizbeth Diaz; Editing by Bill Trott)

Arellano Felix Compound Across the Border From The Campo Minutemen