Mexico City
AP
–
A fire at a drug rehabilitation centre in Mexico’s Guanajuato state, which is plagued by violence, killed 12 people and injured at least three, authorities said Sunday.
The fire broke out in the town of San Jose Ittlebe early Sunday. There, the city government said it was still investigating the cause of the fatal flame.
“We express solidarity with the families of those killed while trying to overcome addiction,” the city government said in a statement, adding that it will help pay funeral costs for those killed.
Mexican media reported that the fire victim was trapped inside a rehabilitation centre.
Mexican privately run drug rehabilitation centres are often abusive, secret, unregulated and underfunded. They have been targets of similar attacks in the past.
Guanajuato’s industrial and agricultural state has been a bloody grass fight scene between the new generation of Jalisco cartel and the local gangster Santa Rosa delima cartel. Guanafuato is the most common murders in any country in Mexico.
Mexican drug gangs have killed street-level dealer suspicions from rival gangs who have previously evacuated in rehabilitation facilities.
In 2020, the gunman shot 27 people at a rehabilitation center in another city in Guanajuato, Irapato. In 2010, 19 people were killed in an attack on a rehabilitation centre in Chihuahua, a northern Mexican city. More than a dozen other attacks on such facilities occurred during the decade during those massacres.
