Fifteen killed in Mexico drug battle near U.S.

By Lizbeth Diaz

TIJUANA, Mexico (Reuters) - Fifteen Mexican drug gang members were killed near the U.S. border on Saturday, their bodies scattered along a road after one of the deadliest shootouts in Mexico's three-year-long narco-war.

Rival factions of the local Arellano Felix drug cartel in Tijuana on the Mexico-California border battled each other with rifles and machine guns in the early hours of the morning, police said.

Fourteen bodies were lying in pools of blood on a road near assembly-for-export maquiladora plants on the city's eastern limits. The corpses were surrounded by hundreds of bullet casings, and many of their faces were destroyed.

The 15th body was found nearby. Eight men were injured and six others were arrested, but some gang members are thought to have escaped.

"By the way this happened and the guns used, we believe the men are from the same cartel, the Arellano Felix gang," said a senior police officer in Tijuana who declined to be named.

Two of the dead are believed to be senior hit men for the Arellano Felix cartel and were identified by the large gold rings on their fingers. The rings carried the icon of Saint Death, a ghoulish figure that gangsters believe protects them, police said.

"Today shows we are facing a terrible war never seen before on the (U.S.-Mexico) border," Baja California Attorney General Rommel Moreno told a news conference.

Police cordoned off all the surrounding roads, forcing workers at a nearby maquiladora to walk through the crime scene to get to work.