20 killed in Mexico border city

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – At least 20 people were killed in drug-gang violence over the weekend in this northern Mexican border city, including seven found dead outside one house.

The seven men were believed to have been at a family party when they were gunned down Saturday night, said Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office in Chihuahua state, where Ciudad Juarez is located.

Eleven other people were killed Saturday in the city, including two whose bodies were found dismembered, Sandoval said. On Sunday, two city police officers, a man and a woman, were shot to death inside their patrol car.

The U.S. Consulate in the northern city of Hermosillo, meanwhile, announced new travel restrictions – including the use of armored vehicles in some areas – for its U.S. employees in the states of Sinaloa and Sonora, “due to extreme threats of violence.”

U.S. personnel also must travel in armored vehicles in the area around Nogales, a town across the border from Nogales, Ariz., “due to widespread violence” and “the threat of known drug trafficking activity throughout northern Sonora.”

U.S. employees traveling from Nogales, Ariz., to Hermosillo, can only use their own vehicles on the Mexican toll road Higway 15 during daylight.

In southern Mexico, police in Oaxaca city found a human head in a gift-wrapped box.

Reporters at the scene saw a threatening message left with the head signed, “the last letter Z,” an apparent reference to the Zetas drug gang.