Gunmen Pepper Mexico TV Station, No One Hurt

By E. Eduardo Castillo,
The Associated Press

Attackers fired more than 100 bullets and threw at least three grenades at a television station in Mexico's western state of Nayarit before dawn Monday, causing damage but no injuries, a company spokesman said.

Enrique Berumen, a spokesman for Mexican broadcasting giant Televisa, said the raid on its XHKG channel in Nayarit was the eighth attack on one of the company's facilities in recent years.

A watchman was the lone employee on duty at the time of the attack and was away from the building when it occurred. Station employees usually end daily transmissions and leave the station around midnight, about an hour and half before the attack occurred.

Investigators found 102 spent cartridges from high-powered rifles as well as pieces of an exploded grenade and two grenades that didn't go off.

Berumen said he didn't know the motive and declined to speculate whether he thought the attackers were from an organized crime group.

"We report confirmed information," he said.

In January 2009, a Televisa station in the northern city of Monterrey was attacked by assailants that authorities later said were associated with the Gulf cartel, one of several drug gangs blamed for a wave of violence that has killed 23,000 people in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon cracked down on organized crime three years ago.

Nayarit isn't known for high levels of drug violence, but the small Pacific coast state is surrounded by other states where cartels are very active.

The international journalism advocacy group Reporters Without Borders says the government hasn't done enough to protect journalists during the drug violence. Five or possibly six journalists have been murdered in Mexico this year and a total of 62 have been murdered since 2000, says the group, which ranks Mexico and Honduras as the Western Hemisphere's two most dangerous countries for the media.