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Crime syndicate hitmen killed a Mexican town mayor, and eight other people were murdered in and around this violent city across the border from the United States, Chihuahua state officials said Thursday.
The body of Mayor Estanislao Garcia of Puerto Palomas de Villa was found inside a vehicle that had caught fire.
"He had been shot with a firearm," an official from the deputy prosecutor's office told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Garcia was abducted Wednesday night while riding in his truck when it was stopped by an armed gang, and he was found dead Thursday in Puerto Palomas de Villa, a town of 6,000 people west of Ciudad Juarez.
In Ciudad Juarez, a key Mexican transit point for illicit drugs bound for the US market, eight other people were found murdered, including a young woman working as a clown whose body was left on a roadside, an official in the prosecutor's office said.
Ciudad Juarez, a city of 1.3 million across the border from El Paso, Texas, has the highest homicide rate in the country with about 1,890 murders so far this year, exceeding the 1,652 for all of 2008 despite more than 8,000 troops deployed across the city since February.
The government has deployed some 50,000 soldiers across Mexico to confront the cartels, whose fierce drug wars have claimed over 14,000 lives since 2006.
