Tag Archives: murders

Mexico to send troops to stem violence after record 25,000 murders

A soldier stands guard next to a crime scene, where men were killed inside a home by unknown assailants, in the municipality of San Nicolas de los Garza, Mexico, January 27, 2018. Picture taken January 27, 2018.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexican officials said on Sunday the government was set to unleash a new wave of troops to crack down on criminal groups in regions where a surge in violence led to more than 25,000 murders last year.

National Security Commissioner Renato Sales said federal police troops will work with local officials to round up known major criminals and bolster investigations.

The aim was “to recover peace and calm for all Mexicans,” he said. He did not provide details on the number of federal police to be deployed.

More than 25,000 murders were recorded last year as rival drug gangs increasingly splintered into smaller, more blood-thirsty groups after more than a decade of a military-led campaign to battle the cartels.

Violence is a central issue ahead of the presidential election in July. Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party is trailing in third place in recent polls.

Sales said federal police troops would be deployed in the states of Colima and Baja California Sur, the resort town of Cancun and the border city of Ciudad Juarez, among others. He said more details would be forthcoming within days.

Earlier this month, the United States slapped its most stringent travel warnings on the states of Colima, Michoacan, Sinaloa, Tamaulipas and Guerrero, ranking them as bad as war-ravaged Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.

At least 25 people were murdered in Mexico this weekend, according to officials and local media, including nine men who were executed at a house party in a suburb of the wealthy northern industrial city of Monterrey.

Masked gunmen burst into a home in San Nicholas de los Garza as a group watched a local soccer team play on television, according to state prosecutors. Seven were killed at the scene and two more died later at a hospital.

There were a wave of attacks in night spots late Saturday and early Sunday. A group of armed men killed three people in a bar in the resort city of Cancun, a Chilean tourist was killed in the Pacific beach resort of Acapulco, and two more were killed in a bar in the capital of Veracruz state.

Six more were killed in the border city of Ciudad Juarez and four more died in the border state of Tamaulipas, where at least 10 were killed during the week at outlaw road blockades and in shootouts, local media reported.

(Reporting by Michael O’Boyle and Diego Ore; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)

New York City murders seen dropping below 300 in 2017

People walk along Sixth Avenue as a cold weather front hits the region in Manhattan, New York, U.S., December 28, 2017.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – New York City is on track to record fewer than 300 murders in 2017, marking a steep decline since the early 1990s when the annual death toll exceeded 2,000 people.

As of Sunday, 284 people were murdered in the nation’s largest city, down from 329 in the same period in 2016, according to New York Police Department (NYPD) data released this week. All seven major crimes tracked by police, including rape, assault and robbery, showed declines.

Barring a spike in the final week of the year, the number of murders in the city will drop under the low of 333 in 2014.

Police officials emphasized that murders continued to decline even as the city’s population swelled to more 8.5 million.

“The homicide rate per capita is lower than anything we have ever seen,” J. Peter Donald, an NYPD spokesman, wrote on Twitter on Thursday. He compared the rate to levels last seen in the 1950s, when there were “1.5 million fewer people living in New York.”

The continued decline is in part vindication for Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat who campaigned for the office in 2013 on his opposition to the NYPD’s widespread use of “stop and frisk” policy, which led to random searches for drugs and weapons.

That year, a federal judge ruled that the practise was unconstitutional because it disproportionately targeted black and Latino New Yorkers.

Under de Blasio, the tactic’s use has been sharply curtailed, and warnings by conservative critics that crime rates would creep back up have proved unfounded.

Fewer than 13,700 robberies have been reported so far in 2017, compared with 15,500 in 2016 and 100,280 in 1990. Serious assaults fell below 20,000, about half the number seen in 1990. Burglaries have dipped below 12,000, compared to 122,055 in 1990.

Police had recorded 1,416 rapes in the year through Sunday, one fewer than the same period last year but above the low in 2009 of 1,205.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

Twenty tortured, then murdered in Pakistan Sufi shrine

Men gather as rescue workers move the bodies of victims, who were killed in a Sufi shrine, on the outskirts of Sargodha, Pakistan

LAHORE, Pakistan (Reuters) – Twenty people were tortured and then murdered with clubs and knives at a Pakistani Sufi shrine, the police said on Sunday, in an attack purportedly carried out by the shrine’s custodian and several accomplices.

Four others were wounded during the attack on Sunday morning at the shrine on the edge of Sargodha, a remote town in the Punjab region.

The custodian of the shrine, Abdul Waheed, called on the worshippers to visit the shrine and then attacked them with his accomplices, said Liaqat Ali Chattha, deputy commissioner for the area.

“As they kept arriving, they were torturing and murdering them,” Chattha told Geo TV.

Pervaiz Haider, a doctor in a Sargodha hospital, said most of the dead were hit on the back of the neck.

“There are bruises and wounds inflicted by a club and dagger on the bodies of victims,” he told Reuters.

Police arrested Waheed. During his interrogation, the custodian told police he believed his victims were out to kill him, said Zulfiqar Hameed, Regional Police Officer for Sargodha.

 

Members of the police forensic unit (R) survey the scene outside a Sufi shrine, after an attack at the shrine, on the outskirts of Sargodha, Pakistan

Members of the police forensic unit (R) survey the scene outside a Sufi shrine, after an attack at the shrine, on the outskirts of Sargodha, Pakistan April 2, 2017. REUTERS/Stringer

“Waheed told police that he killed the people because they had tried to kill him by poisoning him in the past, and again they were there to kill him,” Hameed told Reuters.

Reuters could not immediately find contact details for Waheed or any lawyer representing him.

With its ancient hypnotic rituals, Sufism is a mystical form of Islam that has been practised in Pakistan for centuries.

But in recent months, Sufi shrines have been targeted by extremist Sunni militants who consider them heretics, including a suicide bombing by Islamic State that killed more than 80 worshippers at a shrine in Lal Shahbaz Qalandar shrine in southern Sindh province.

Last November, an explosion ripped through another Sufi shrine, the Shah Noorani in southwestern Pakistan, killing at least 52 people. Islamic State also claimed responsibility for that attack.

(Reporting by Mubasher Bukhari; Writing by Drazen Jorgic; Editing by Randy Fabi)