Two car bombs were almost simultaneously detonated near Public Security Ministry (SSP) buildings in two Guanajuato state municipalities on Thursday morning, injuring three police officers, one seriously.
Both bombings occurred almost simultaneously, just after 6 a.m. No warning was given before the bombs exploded,
The three officers were wounded when the car bomb exploded outside the Acámbaro police headquarters building of the local SSP complex, damaging the exterior of the police headquarters and two adjacent houses. A female police officer was badly wounded while two policemen were treated onsite for minor injuries.
In the other bombing, a police car exploded in front of the downtown SSP building in the city of Jerécuaro. Only material damages were reported, with local authorities indicating that nobody was injured.
Acámbaro — a city of 56,000 people — and Jerécuaro — population 8,011 — are about 33 kilometers apart in the southernmost part of the state, near the state’s borders with the state of Michoacán.
Security officials in the Bajio-region state have suffered a number of attacks in the past week, and October has been a particularly violent month.
In a different incident, Acámbaro police engaged in a shootout on Monday on a highway on the southern outskirts of the city. The National Guard, the Army and state police officers arrested three men after chasing them through a crop field. Authorities confiscated weapons, tactical gear and an unspecified amount of drugs.
On Tuesday, President Claudia Sheinbaum met with Guanajuato Governor Libia García to discuss security operations, especially regarding the city of Celaya, where three municipal police officers were executed on Oct. 12.
From the scale of damage this appears to be one of the biggest car bombs ever used by cartels in Mexico. A worrying escalating. https://t.co/yufV3Vqw2c
— Ioan Grillo (@ioangrillo) October 24, 2024
The three victims — part of a group of over 300 former members of Mexico’s defunct Federal Police force hired by Celaya’s former mayor but in the process of being fired by the current mayor — were killed when gunmen opened fire in a bar. Another woman in the bar was also seriously injured.
According to the newspaper Milenio, the Oct. 12 attack brought to 49 the number of policemen killed in Guanajuato this year, 27 of them in Celaya.
The first three days of October were particularly violent in Guanajuato, with 32 people murdered on Oct. 3 alone. Sixteen people were executed in the city of Salamanca, including at least four residents of a rehab center who were slain by a group of armed men that burst into the building. Five others were wounded in the attack, and several patients were kidnapped.
Government Secretary Jorge Jiménez Lona attributed the violence to an ongoing dispute between the Jalisco New General Cartel (CJNG) and the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel, according to the newspaper El País.
With reports from El Universal, Infobae, Milenio, El Correo and El País
