Mexico City: Seven people were killed and five were wounded in a shooting at a bar in southeastern Mexico, authorities said Sunday, the latest in a series of similar attacks in the violence-plagued country.
A search has been launched for the perpetrators of Saturday night’s shooting in the city of Villahermosa, Tabasco state, the Secretariat of State Security and Civil Defense said in a statement.
“Video surveillance cameras are being analyzed and state and federal authorities have deployed coordinated patrols to locate and arrest those responsible,” it said.
The death toll was initially put at five, but the Tabasco public prosecutor’s office later said two more people had died in the attack on what it described as “a clandestine bar that operated irregularly”. Was.
According to local media, unidentified gunmen entered the bar La Casita Azul and opened fire on customers, leaving bloodied bodies scattered on the floor.
Tabasco, home to oil production facilities, has seen an increase in violent crime in recent months.
In November, another armed attack on a bar in Villahermosa left six people dead and 10 injured.
It came two weeks after 10 people were killed in an attack on a bar in the city of Querétaro, in a central region that has so far been spared violence linked to organized crime.
That same weekend, six people were killed in a shooting at a bar in a suburb of Mexico City.
More than 450,000 people have died in drug-related violence in Mexico since the government deployed the army to combat trafficking in 2006, according to official figures.
Dealing with the daily killings and kidnappings is one of the major challenges facing President Claudia Sheinbaum.
The former mayor of Mexico City, who became the country’s first female president on October 1, has refused to declare “war” on drug cartels.
Instead he has pledged to continue his previous strategy of using social policy as well as better use of intelligence to root out crime.
