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At least 14 die in Mexican jail clash

06 August 2010 23:31 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. At least 14 prisoners died on Friday due to fighting between convicts in a jail in Matamoros, a city in border state Tamaulipas, local broadcaster Formato 21 said, APA reports Xinhua News Agency.

A reporter on the scene told listeners that police and soldiers had locked down the jail and restored order to the prison, where the men had been attacking each other with knives. Authorities are conducting investigations to discover the cause of the fighting.

Fighting began at the jail, called the Sanctions and Executions Center, in Santa Adelaida at 5 a.m. local time (1000 GMT) between prisoners that had been jailed for federal crimes, the most serious category, in July.

Tamaulipas’ Public Security Director Jose Ives Soberon said that the dead prisoner had recently entered the prison.

According to the first investigations, two rival groups seeking the control in the prison clashed against each other and killed these 14 prisoners. Most of them are fulfilling sentence for crimes of federal kind.

The authorities did not say if there are injured prisoners.

Meanwhile, the guards, federal and state agents, as well as troops achieved the control of the situation.

Matamoros, which faces Brownsville in U.S. state Texas, has suffered multiple clashes from cartels fighting over routes to smuggle drugs into the United States. In late June, the state saw the murder of Rodolfo Torre Cantu, a gubernatorial candidate for the Institutional Revolution Party (PRI), in the run up to the nation’s July 4 election.

Responding to the death, the government called a series of debates to seek new ways to fight the nation’s cartels, which have been top policy priority since President Felipe Calderon took office in December 2006.

During Tuesday’s session of the debate, Mexico’s National Security and Research Center (CISEN) said that more than 28,000 people had died since the start in December 2006 of the anti-drug- trafficking campaign. The vast majority of these were cartel members killed by rival gangs.