Mexico, Deaths | featured news

Top Mexican drug lord Ezequiel "Tony Tormenta" Cardenas died in a shootout with security forces on Friday in the border city of Matamoros across from Brownsville, Texas, Mexico's navy said.

Guards and officials at a prison in northern Mexico allegedly let inmates out, lent them guns and sent them off in official vehicles to carry out drug-related killings, including the massacre of 17 people last week, prosecutors said Sunday.

Authorities in the Mexican border state of Nuevo Leon have finished excavating and are trying to identify 51 bodies they found in nine hidden mass graves, state media said.

Mexico demanded an investigation on Tuesday into the apparent shooting death of a teenager by a U.S. border patrol agent, an incident bound to stoke cross-border tensions over illegal immigration.

A fight at a jail between rival drug gangs in northwestern Mexico killed 23 inmates on Wednesday, the army said.

Nineteen people were killed and dozens were injured during a two-hour prison riot in the northern Mexico state of Durango, local officials said Saturday.

A health official says the death toll from a day care center fire in northern Mexico has risen to 46 following the death of a toddler.

Parents of the children trapped in a burning Mexican day care center rammed their vehicles into the building to try to free the trapped children, witnesses told CNN. At least 38 children died when flames engulfed the building.

Twenty-seven children were killed and more than 100 others were injured Friday when their daycare center caught fire in the northwestern state of Sonora, the local governor said, citing figures from the state attorney's office.

MEXICO CITY — Mexico has confirmed two more deaths from swine flu, bringing the death toll to 66, the health secretary said Friday. Tests have confirmed 239 more cases for a total of 2,895 cases, including the deaths, said Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova. The numbers jumped because officials were able to process more backlogged cases.
The deaths represent 2.3 percent of the total cases, showing the illness is less deadly than initially feared, Cordova said.

The last death was May 10.