Mexican army troops scoured the remote mountains of western Mexico on Sunday in search of leftist rebels amid new violence in the troubled region.
Two police officers were wounded in an attack late Saturday by unknown gunmen in Guerrero, the state where bloody battles last week between army troops and guerrillas of the Popular Revolutionary Army killed at least nine people.
But state officials played down a front-page report in Mexico City’s El Universal newspaper Sunday that pinned the attack on EPR rebels.
“We are not sure of their identities,” state spokesman Pedro Julio Valdez Vilchis said. He said the attack may have been related to a drug-trafficking dispute.
Two assailants began shooting at a group of state policemen as they ate dinner at a roadside restaurant in San Luis La Loma, some 50 miles north of this Pacific tourist resort, the state government said in a statement.
The EPR is believed to have several hundred well-armed fighters in a handful of central Mexican states but is not viewed as a serious threat to Mexico’s army.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s official National Human Rights Commission said Sunday that it sent a team of investigators to Guerrero to check on mounting allegations of human rights abuses by the army during its search for rebels.
