Attackers in SUV cut family’s car off near the border, then opened fire, killing 13-year-old girl and wounding her brother and parents

This article is more than 8 months old

This article is more than 8 months old

Mexican authorities are searching for the gunmen responsible for an attack on a sparsely traveled stretch of highway near the Texas border that left a 13-year-old American girl dead and three relatives wounded.

On Saturday night, a family traveling in two vehicles was attacked on a two-lane highway paralleling the US-Mexico border in the township of Ciudad Mier.

The area is known as a hot spot in Mexico’s long-running drug war where rival cartels battle over lucrative cross-border smuggling routes and control of other illicit activities.

The girl’s 10-year-old brother, also a US citizen, was injured in the attack, along with the children’s parents, who are Mexican nationals but legal residents of the United States, a state security source told Reuters.

The boy plus his 48-year-old father and 42-year-old mother all remain in a local hospital, the source said, who described their condition as “serious but stable”.

One SUV of attackers passed the family and then cut them off causing them to collide and come to a halt. Gunmen then opened fire, according to a statement from the state of Tamaulipas security coordinating group. All of the wounded came from one of the family’s vehicles, both of which had Oklahoma license plates. The gunmen escaped in another vehicle.

The family was returning to the US after spending the holidays in the central Mexico state of San Luis Potosí. What remained unclear was why the family was on such a dangerous stretch of highway after dark.

The area where the attack occurred is contested by drug cartels.

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For years Ciudad Mier was the uppermost edge of the Gulf cartel’s control while Nueva Ciudad Guerrero was the limit for the Nuevo Laredo-based Zetas. Between them sit uninhabited scrubland.

In 2010, after the Zetas split from the Gulf cartel and established themselves as an organized criminal power through prominent displays of graphic violence, Mier became a battleground for the two cartels and most of its residents abandoned the quaint colonial town.

More recently, however, the Zetas splinter group known as the Northeast cartel has been active as far downriver as Mier, Miguel Alemán and Camargo, well into what was traditionally the Gulf cartel’s territory.

Photographs from Saturday nights crime scene showed the Northeast cartel’s Spanish initials CDN scrawled on the back window of one of the vehicles.