Gunmen shot dead a state judge outside a courthouse in Mexico’s violence-wracked Pacific coast resort town of Acapulco on Wednesday.
The prosecutor’s office in the southern state of Guerrero said it was reviewing security camera footage to try to identify the killers.
The attack killed Edmundo Román Pinzón, who was a criminal court judge and also served on a state appeals court. Acapulco has seen nearly two decades of unrelenting violence, the result of internecine battles between several warring drug gangs.
Assassinations of members of the judiciary in Mexico are relatively rare, but they have occurred in the past. Some judges are said to be victims of pressure from organized crime, and lawyers involved in drug cases have also been killed in the past.
In 2020, a federal judge and his wife were killed in the western Mexican state of Colima, and in 2006, a federal judge was shot while traveling in his car near a prison in Maximum security outside Mexico City, which holds some of Mexico’s highest-ranking leaders. drug suspects.
Wednesday’s killing comes just two days after attackers shot dead a federal congressman in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz. Representative Benito Aguas Atlahua was a member of the Green Party, an ally of the ruling Morena party. Investigators have not yet publicly identified a possible motive for Monday’s killing.
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