Man arrested after women and children massacred in ambush
A man has been arrested a year after three women and six children were killed in a massacre in northern Mexico.
The Mexican attorney general’s office said the man is “a member of a criminal organisation” and was likely involved in the deaths of the nine American-Mexican Mormons on November 4, 2019, CNN reported.
The man, identified as Alfredo L, is facing charges of homicide and organised crime.
He was arrested in the city of Ciudad Juarez which borders El Paso on the US-Mexican border.
The victims, as well as eight other children, were travelling in a convoy of three cars from the community of La Mora in Sonora state to the neighbouring state of Chihuahua when they were ambushed by gunmen.
The group were all part of the LeBaron family, a group of US Mormons who settled in northern Mexico.
Among the victims was Rhonita Maria Miller who died alongside four of her children, two of which were twin eight-month-old babies.
One of the surviving children from the ambush, a 13-year-old boy, walked 23km to find help after the shooting.
He had hid some of his siblings in bushes while a baby was found alive in the footwell of one of the vehicles.
One car had been set alight with some of the victims inside.
Authorities did not reveal why they believed Alfredo L was connected to the shootings or what gang he was believed to be from.
He is only the second person arrested over the deaths with little information released by authorities on what they believed sparked the ambush. One theory is that they were victims of mistaken identity in an area where two gangs are embroiled in a dispute over territory, the BBC reported.
In 2010, two members of the Chihuahua Mormon community, including one from the LeBaron family, were killed in an apparent revenge attack after security forces tracked drug gang members. The Mormons had suffered widespread kidnappings before that.
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