Narco Blog: Children Witness Execution in Ciudad Juarez

Armed assailants gunned down a man inside an elementary school in this northern border city, Mexico’s murder capital, local authorities said.

The victim had sought refuge from the gunmen inside the school, where he was shot dead Thursday and his body left on a soccer field, municipal police spokesman Adrian Sanchez told Efe.

At the time of the incident, the students were exiting the premises at the end of the school day and the doors were open. No injuries were reported among the students and the school canceled Thursday’s evening classes at the facility.

The victim, believed to be between the ages of 25 and 30, has not yet been identified, Sanchez said.

Ciudad Juarez, located across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, has the world’s second-highest homicide rate after San Pedro Sula, Honduras, according to a recent report from the Mexican non-governmental organization Citizen’s Council for Public Security and Penal Justice.

Juarez suffered 1,974 homicides last year, down from 3,115 murders in 2010, according to statistics from the Chihuahua state Attorney General’s Office.

The city has been the scene in the past few years of a brutal territorial struggle between the Sinaloa and Juarez drug cartels, part of a larger conflict involving criminals and security forces that has claimed some 50,000 lives since December 2006.

Read at Narco Blog is Spanish Here