A group of armed men in a pickup truck ambushed and opened fired Thursday on six police officers on a main avenue in the center of Guaymas, a Sonoran industrial port city about 300 miles south of Tucson.
Three of the officers died at the scene and another died at a hospital, El Imparcial reported. Two others were wounded and transferred to a hospital in Hermosillo, Sonora.
A traffic officer was also killed during a separate incident when he tried to stop the gunmen from fleeing.
The Sonora newspaper identified those who were killed as: Enrique Alamillo Romero, 46; Marlon Islans DueΓ±as, 39; Pedro Corral VelΓ‘squez, 27; Dulce Alejandra Rojo Nava, 20; and Abraham GarcΓa Coronado, 51.
The army and federal and municipal forces are searching for the perpetrators, but no arrests had been made as of Friday afternoon, according to media reports.
The attack comes after a video surfaced in late July that appears to show Guaymas municipal police officers handing over four men to people linked to organized crime, the national newspaper El Universal reported.
The U.S. State Department has issued an advisory for certain parts of Sonora since. Among other precautions, it prohibits its employees from travel to San Carlos, Guaymas, Empalme and all points south of Hermosillo via Federal Highway 15.
βSonora is a key location used by the international drug trade and human trafficking networks,β the advisory says. But it adds that northern Sonora experiences lower level of crime than cities closer to its neighboring state Sinaloa and other parts of Mexico.
In March, a commander in Guaymas was also shot and killed following a pursuit through the historic downtown.
The gunmen shot Francisco Genaro BogarΓn GutiΓ©rrez, 43, multiple times while he was driving his Nissan Pathfinder, according to media reports. The vehicle came to a stop after crashing against a stoplight.
