Town’s police resign en masse

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – An entire 20-man police force resigned in a northern Mexican town after a series of attacks that killed the police chief and five officers over the last three months, state officials said Thursday.

The officers’ resignation Thursday left the 13,000 people of Ascension without local police services, Chihuahua state chief prosecutor Carlos Manuel Salas said. State and federal police have moved in to take over police work, he said.

The mass resignation appeared to be connected to a Tuesday attack by gunmen that killed three of the town’s officers, Salas said.

But it wasn’t the first deadly attack on the police department this year.

In mid-May, police chief Manuel Martinez, who had been in office just seven months, was gunned down with two other officers on a nearby highway. The three had been kidnapped a day before police found their bodies riddled with bullets in the back seat of a sedan.

The town’s police force was relatively new.

Angry residents had led authorities to replace the entire force last September. People claimed police officers were aiding drug gangs.

Martinez, with his new police force, had said he wanted to end the kidnappings and extortions that have terrorized the town where people grow green chilies and cotton.

Ascension is southwest of Ciudad Juarez, the border city across from El Paso, Texas, that is one of Mexico’s most violent cities. The state of Chihuahua has had the most homicides blamed on organized crime and drug trafficking since the government’s anti-drug offensive began in December 2006.