CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - A gang of gunmen killed an off-duty U.S. airman and five other people early Wednesday at a bar in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, authorities said.
Meanwhile, gunmen assassinated an army general recently named police chief of Garcia, a town in the northern state of Nuevo Leon. It the latest attack against a military official appointed to take over municipal police forces, which President Felipe Calderon has acknowledged are plagued with corruption.
All 70 officers of the Garcia police force were questioned in the attack, Nuevo Leon Gov. Rodrigo Medina said at a news conference. He said soldiers and state police will be sent to patrol the town.
There was no immediate information on a motive for the attack that killed the U.S. airman at the Amadeus bar in Ciudad Juarez, which also left a seventh person wounded, said Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for prosecutors in northern Chihuahua state. But the methods bore the hallmarks of attacks by drug cartels.
The attacks raised to 30 the number of homicides in Ciudad Juarez in just four days. The city is one of the world's most violent, with 1,900 people killed in drug-related attacks this year alone.
Staff Sgt. David Booher, assigned to the medical unit of the 49th Fighter Wing at Holloman Air Force outside Alamogordo, New Mexico, about 90 miles (145 kilometers) north of Ciudad Juarez, was among those killed in the bar, the U.S. Air Force said.
Earlier this year, the 12th Air Force barred airmen from traveling in Mexico's Chihuahua state. Soldiers from Fort Bliss, just outside El Paso, Texas, across the border from Juarez, also are barred from going to Chihuahua.
Prosecutors later said four men were found dead outside the perimeter wall of Pedro E. Medina Gonzalez primary school in another part of Ciudad Juarez. Classes were in session at the time.