3 Cops Kidnapped and Killed in Mexico Border Town

Gunmen in the Mexican border city of Acuña kidnapped and killed three police officers, authorities said Monday.

Acuña Public Safety Department said in a statement that the three were on patrol in the same unit when the assailants kidnapped them early Monday.

The officer's bodies were found an hour later in a residential area of Acuña, which is across the border from Del Rio, Texas. They had been shot and their hands were handcuffed, the police department said.

Authorities say the Zetas and the Sinaloa drug cartels are fighting each other to control smuggling routes in the state of Coahuila, where Acuña is located.

Last week, gunmen killed a federal prosecutor for the state of Coahuila when he was about to leave his home in the city of Torreón.

A day earlier, gunmen set a fire at the office of the Torreón newspaper El Siglo and fired shots at it. No injuries were reported.

Authorities in the neighboring state of Durango said soldiers dug up the remains of seven people from a pit.

Durango state prosecutors said troops found the remains in the town of San Juan del Río, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) north of the state capital, the city of Durango. They gave no other details.

More than 400 bodies have been found in a series of clandestine graves in Tamaulipas and Durango states since April. They are believed to be a result of turf battles between drug cartels.

In Hidalgo, the home state of Zetas leader Heriberto Lazcano, state police chief Damian Canales said authorities detained eight local police officers for allegedly working for the Zetas.

Canales said six of those detained were officers for the town of Actopan and two for the state capital of Pachuca. He said they were detained after the arrest of the former police chief in the town of Arenal, who authorities allege was in charge of recruiting police officers to work for the Zetas.

Canales said the Pachuca city police officers told investigators the Zetas paid them about $360 a month.

Also on Monday, military authorities said soldiers in the border state of Chihuahua detained two police chiefs while they were meeting with an alleged drug trafficker.

Soldiers detained the police chief and a police officer for the town of Gran Morelos and the police chief for the town of Belisario Domínguez while they met with a boss for La Linea, a gang of hit men for the Juárez Cartel, the Defense Department said in a statement.

It said an anonymous phone call led the troops to the meeting in the town of Belisario Domínguez. Soldiers arrested two other men and seized three handguns and four automatic rifles, the statement added.

President Felipe Calderón has been pushing to clean up local and state police forces, whose officers are often corrupt or are coerced by threats into helping drug gangs.

Based on reporting by the Associated Press.