Mexico City, Feb 4 (EFE).- Eight suspected criminals died in a pair of clashes with security forces on a road linking the northeastern Mexican border cities of Reynosa and Matamoros, officials said.
Federal forces came under fire Tuesday afternoon from armed civilians traveling in an SUV on the Matamoros-Reynosa highway in Tamaulipas state, leading to a shootout in which four suspected criminals were killed, the Tamaulipas Coordination Group said in a statement Tuesday.
Prior to the clash, at around 2:15 p.m., roadblocks had been set up in the municipality of Valle Hermoso, also located near the U.S. border, and authorities received reports of suspicious activity in the towns of Control and Estacion Ramirez, which are part of Matamoros, the statement said.
Minutes after the first clash, federal forces shot and killed four other suspected criminals riding in a car after they had come under fire on that same highway.
Elsewhere in Tamaulipas along the U.S.-Mexico border, on the Nuevo Progreso-Rio Bravo highway, soldiers found the dead body of a man believed to have been killed by a members of a rival criminal gang.
These latest violent incidents came hours after five people died earlier Tuesday in clashes with marines and members of the Tamaulipas force in the municipalities of Valle Hermoso and Reynosa.
Tamaulipas, which borders Texas, has been for years a battleground between the Gulf and Los Zetas drug cartels and is regularly among the Mexican states with the highest numbers of homicides.
President Enrique Peña Nieto sent additional Federal Police and military personnel to Tamaulipas last May and ordered a thorough vetting of the state and municipal police forces to root out corrupt officers.
