Ciudad Juarez, Mexico - Masked gunmen shot dead six people, including a US Air Force sergeant, in an attack on a strip bar in the notoriously violent Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, officials said.
Three other US military were also wounded in Wednesday's attack, according to an official from the state deputy attorney general's office who declined to be named.
Masked men armed with pistols and assault rifles stormed into the Amadeus bar, which was packed with about 60 people, and opened fire, according to witnesses.
The attackers, all dressed in black, first sought to remove six men from the bar before shooting them dead when they resisted, police said.
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Twenty-five others were killed in various attacks on Tuesday and Wednesday in Chihuahua state, which has been at the heart of drug-related violence that has left some 14 000 dead since the end of 2006.
A military spokesman confirmed the death of Air Force staff sergeant David Booher in the incident and said Mexican police were investigating.
Booher, 26, was attached to the 49th medical group at Holloman Air Force base in New Mexico, base spokesman Tom Fuller told AFP. He was from El Paso, Texas, just across the border from Ciudad Juarez.
Another US service member, 35-year-old Jorge Alberto Arguelles, was seriously injured, and two others were slightly hurt, the local justice official said.
The US Consulate in Ciudad Juarez declined to comment on the deaths.
Fifteen of the deaths on Tuesday and Wednesday were in Ciudad Juarez, where more than 2 000 people have been killed this year despite the deployment of 8 500 troops.
Four men, whose ages ranged between 15 and 25 were lined up against a school wall and shot execution style, a police official said on condition of anonymity.
Armed men in eight separate vehicles shot and killed municipal police chief Arturo Esparza and four bodyguards as they rode in a van in the northern state of Nuevo Leon, Garcia mayor Jaime Rodriguez told reporters.
Esparza, a retired general, had assumed his post on Saturday in the town located in the Monterrey metropolitan area.
At an empty lot in Tijuana - across the border from San Diego, California - the bodies of two men and a woman were found "masked," an asphyxiation method of revenge used by rival drug traffickers, a local police source said.
President Felipe Calderon deployed some 50 000 security forces across the country after he took office in December 2006, in a controversial crackdown that has failed to stem violence from powerful drug cartels. - AFP
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