Gunmen kill 17 in drug rehab centre

MEXICO CITY, Mexico - Gunmen have shot and killed 17 patients, and wounded two others in a drug rehabilitation centre in Juarez, in northern Mexico late Wednesday (local time) reports CNN.

Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz said authorities believe a rival drug gang attacked the men at the El Aviane rehab facility. "At the very least, it was one organized crime group thinking that another group was operating in that place," Reyes told CNN.

Reyes also said the killings were similar to an attack at a drug facility in March that left 20 patients dead.

More than 1,420 people have been killed in Juarez this year, Reyes told CNN. It is reported that around 1,600 people were killed in Juarez in 2008.

The killings came on the same day that gunmen shot dead a top security official and three others in Michoacan, the home state of Mexican President Felipe Calderon.

Jose Manuel Revuelta Lopez, the deputy public safety secretary of Mexico's Michoacan state, was killed in a shootout that also claimed the lives of two of his bodyguards and a bystander caught in the crossfire, said Jesus Humberto Adame Ortiz, spokesman for the state.

An unprecedented wave of violence has washed over Mexico since Calderon declared war on drug cartels shortly after coming into office in December 2006. More than 11,000 people have since died, about 1,000 of them police says CNN.

- NZ HERALD STAFF