Gunmen shot and killed a state judge outside a court building Wednesday in the violence-wracked Pacific coast resort of Acapulco in Mexico.
The prosecutors’ office in the southern state of Guerrero said they were reviewing security camera footage to try to identify the killers.
The attack killed Edmundo Román Pinzón, who served as a criminal court judge and also sat on a state appeals court. Acapulco has seen almost two decades of unrelenting violence, the result of turf battles between a number of warring drug gangs.
Killings of members of the judiciary branch in Mexico are relatively rare, but have happened in the past. Some judges are believed to be pressured by 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 Mexico state of Colima, and in 2006, a federal judge was shot to death while traveling in his car near a maximum-security prison outside Mexico City that holds some of Mexico’s top drug suspects.
Wednesday’s killing comes just two days after assailants in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz shot to death a federal congressman. Rep. Benito Aguas Atlahua was a member of the Green Party, an ally of the ruling Morena party. Investigators have yet to publicly identify any possible motive in Monday’s slaying.
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