14 Die in Brawl at Mexican Prison While Another Car Bomb Explodes

The Associated Press

Fourteen inmates were killed Friday in a brawl at a prison in the northern Mexican border city of Matamoros, authorities said.

The Tamaulipas state Public Safety secretary, Jose Ives Soberon, said in a statement that all of the fatalities died of stab wounds.

Prison officials, who became aware of the disturbance around 5:00 a.m., managed to restore order with help from state and municipal police, the statement said.

Most of the dead were defendants sent to the prison last month to await trial on federal charges.

On March 25, at least 41 convicts serving sentences for federal offenses escaped from the penitentiary in Matamoros, a city just across the border from Brownsville, Texas.

Friday’s prison fight came a little more than 12 hours after a car exploded in the parking lot of the Tamaulipas Public Safety Department in Ciudad Victoria, the state capital. No one was hurt in the blast, but two police vehicles were damaged.

Army troops, federal police, firefighters and investigators from the Mexican Attorney General’s Office were called in to secure the scene and collect evidence.

Authorities have offered no information on the possible cause of the explosion.

Four people were killed last month when drug-cartel gunmen detonated a car bomb in the northern border city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico’s murder capital.

Tamaulipas is one of the Mexican states most affected by a drug war that has claimed more than 28,000 lives nationwide since December 2006.