WORLD NEWS | 16 soldiers face military charges for killing 5 men in Mexican border city

MEXICO CITY, June 11 (AP) — Mexico’s defense ministry said 16 soldiers will be tried on military charges related to the killing of five men in the Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo last month.

The 16 soldiers were arrested on Thursday and will be held in a military prison in Mexico City pending a court-martial, the department said. The soldiers were accused of violating “military discipline”.

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The trials will be conducted independently of any charges that civil prosecutors may bring, the department said. Under Mexican law, any soldier abuse involving civilians must go through civil courts, but separate charges can be filed in military courts.

Mexico’s president has described the May 18 killing of five men caught on security camera footage in the cartel-controlled city across from Laredo, Texas, as an apparent “execution”.

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Security camera footage from the store released earlier this month showed a black pickup truck crashing into a wall at full speed.

A Mexican army truck apparently chasing it arrived shortly thereafter, crashing into the passenger side of the pickup. Passengers in the truck were dragged out, kicked and forced against a wall. They were later found dead.

“Obviously it’s an execution, it’s not allowed,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador told a daily news conference on Wednesday. “Those responsible will be handed over to the appropriate authorities.”

López Obrador has given the military an unprecedented role in Mexican life, from law enforcement to infrastructure projects to running trains and airports. He staunchly defended the integrity of the military, which continues to be plagued by complaints of human rights abuses, especially in Nuevo Laredo.

The city is dominated by Northeast drug cartels, and shootouts between cartel gunmen and soldiers or rival gangs are common.

The incident was at least the second killing involving the military in Nuevo Laredo this year. On 26 February, soldiers killed five young people who were sitting in a car.

The men were clearly unarmed. A report by the Mexican government’s human rights agency said soldiers opened fire on the vehicle without verbally ordering it to stop. Angry neighbors attacked the soldiers, beating some of them.

In April, federal prosecutors charged four soldiers in the case with homicide.

That same month, a human rights group in Nuevo Laredo sent a formal complaint to López Obrador. In it, a man said Mexican National Guard troops opened fire on his vehicle in Nuevo Laredo, killing his pregnant 15-year-old girlfriend and a 54-year-old friend and wounding two others. A law enforcement crime scene report of the incident largely corroborates the description of the shooting in the complaint.

López Obrador claimed the military had changed and tried to describe the latest killings as isolated acts of bad soldiers. (Associated Press)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)