Sinaloa

The fourth corpse pulled from the bullet-shattered pickup truck didn't have the benefit of a body bag. Only the face was covered (with a useless bulletproof vest). The victim's red shirt was even redder, soaked with blood. His bare arm hung limply from a gurney as he was lifted to a wagon from the morgue, the toes of his boots pointed skyward, at odd angles.

Mexican authorities said Wednesday that they arrested a leading drug figure known as El Rey after a shootout in Mexico City early this week. Jesus Zambada Garcia, the brother of a suspected drug kingpin in the western state of Sinaloa, was among 16 people captured Monday, Atty. Gen. Eduardo Medina Mora said. The attorney general said Zambada, whose nickname means "the king," commanded one of four branches of the so-called Sinaloa cartel, leading its operations in central Mexico.

Six members of the Mexican government's top organized-crime unit have been arrested on suspicion of leaking information to drug traffickers, officials said Wednesday. An official in the Mexican attorney general's office said a supervisor and five agents are thought to have passed tips to smugglers in the west-central state of Sinaloa for about three months.

At least 21 people, including a 12-year-old girl and other ordinary citizens, have been killed by warring drug gangs since Thursday in the western state of Sinaloa, in one of the worst spasms of violence in memory in a region long conditioned to narcotics-related savagery. The wave of deadly mayhem began with the audacious daytime shooting of a dozen people in the capital, Culiacan, and continued during the weekend and into Monday.

Gunmen shot 12 people to death in broad daylight near the center of Culiacan on Thursday, marking one of the more bloody and brazen recent attacks in the capital of a state beset by drug trafficking and violence. The Sinaloa state prosecutor's office said armed men opened fire in an auto repair shop about 11:20 a.m., killing six people inside and three more just outside the doors.

Mexico's raging drug war claimed the lives of six more police officers, ambushed on patrol in the marijuana-rich state of Sinaloa, authorities said Friday. The attack followed the slaying Thursday of a senior police commander, part of a long string of killings apparently aimed at eroding public confidence in the government's ability to challenge drug gangs.

Seven Mexican federal agents looking for an arms cache were killed early Tuesday in a shootout in the western state of Sinaloa, officials said. The agents came under fire when they went to search a home in Culiacan, the state capital. Four agents were wounded. At least one of the gunmen was reported killed during the confrontation, which occurred amid a wave of drug-related violence in Mexico. Two suspects were arrested, the federal Public Security Ministry said in a statement.

Thousands of troops moved into Mexico's violent Sinaloa state to fight a powerful drug cartel, after a wave of police slayings across the country. The soldiers arrived in military transport planes as helicopters hovered over the state capital, Culiacan, and troops joined federal police in setting up roadblocks and patrolling streets. Dozens of military vehicles, some with heavy machine guns, roared through the city on their way to the nearby town of Navolato, passing a bullet-riddled police vehicle on a tow truck.

A police officer and four other suspects with ties to a powerful drug cartel have been arrested in the assassination of Mexico's acting federal police chief, authorities said. The three men and two women belonged to a cell acting on the orders of the Sinaloa drug cartel, said Gerardo Garay, the anti-drug coordinator for the federal police. Police captured all five suspects hours after the Thursday assassination of Edgar Millan Gomez. Garay said the group was led by Jose Antonio Montes Garfias, a federal police officer who had been assigned to a unit in the northern state of Sinaloa, but was on medical leave and never reported to work.