A local Mexican government official was shot dead while attending an amateur basketball game after a gunman burst into a sports hall on Saturday, officials said.
Families and children were gathered at the sports center in the violent state of Guanajuato, where Ignacio Alejandro Roaro, a city council secretary in Apaseo el Grande, was killed.
The city council “strongly condemns the treacherous, despicable, and cowardly attack that occurred this Saturday, in which our colleague and friend, city council secretary Ignacio Alejandro Roaro, lost his life,” it said in a statement.
Local media said an armed man had been arrested.
Guanajuato is a thriving industrial hub and home to several popular tourist destinations, but it is also Mexico’s deadliest state due to gang turf wars.
Criminal violence, most of it linked to drug trafficking, has claimed around 480,000 lives in Mexico since 2006 and left more than 120,000 people missing.
Much of the violence in Guanajuato is linked to conflict between the Santa Rosa de Lima gang and the Jalisco New Generation cartel, one of the most powerful in the Latin American nation. The Jalisco cartel is one of several that have been designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the Trump administration.
Guanajuato recorded more than 3,000 murders last year, the most of any Mexican state and accounting for 10.5 percent of the cases nationwide, according to official figures.
The bloodshed has continued this year.
In June, 11 people were shot dead and about 20 others injured in a shooting targeting a neighborhood party in Irapuato, about 50 miles west of Apaseo el Grande. A 17-year-old was among those killed, along with eight adult men and two women, the Guanajuato state prosecutor’s office said, vowing that the crime would not go unpunished.
A month earlier, investigators said they found 17 bodies in an abandoned house in Guanajuato. Just days before that, officials said gunmen opened fire and killed seven people, including children, in the same state, and officers found two banners with messages alluding to the Santa Rosa de Lima gang.
In February, five women and three men were shot dead in the street in Guanajuato. The month before that, security forces clashed with gunmen in the state, leaving 10 suspected criminals dead and three police officers injured.
