Gunmen convoy near Mexico City

Officials said drug gang men attacked a police convoy in central Mexico on Thursday, killing eight state police officers and five prosecution investigators.

The massacre of 13 law enforcement officers in the state of Mexico was the country’s single largest law enforcement since October 2019, when cartel gunmen killed 14 state police officers in the neighboring state of Michoacán.

On Thursday, the ambush was a major discovery of murderers in a rural, gang-ravaged area southwest of Mexico City, which is surrounded on three sides by the state of Mexico. Dead law enforcement officers worked for the state.

While the state of Mexico includes the capital’s suburbs, it also includes lawless mountains and scrub lands where the attack took place.

Rodrigo Martinez Salis, the head of the state’s Department of Public Safety, said soldiers, naval and National Guard soldiers were searching for the killers from the ground and from the air.

“The convoys were patrolling the area, which was fine for fighting criminal groups operating in the area,” Martinez Sell said. “This aggression is an attack on the Mexican government.

“We will all respond with force,” he said.

There was no immediate indication of which gang or cartel the gunmen belonged to. Cotepec does a number of works in the vicinity of Harinas, where the attack took place.

The city is near a hot spring, known as Ikshepan de la Sal, popular among residents of Mexico City as a weekend getaway. But it is relatively close to cities such as Taxco, where authorities have reported activities by the Gerreos Unidos gang, apparently allied with the Jalisco Cartel and dominated by the Arsilia gang, the Familia Michéacán crime organization.

The attack presents a challenge to President Andres Manuel López Obredor, who has adopted a strategy of not directly confronting drug cartels in an attempt to avoid violence.