One person was killed and at least six others were injured in shootings targeting bars in the suburbs of the Mexican resort town of Cancun on Friday, local authorities said.
“Six people were injured and another was shot and killed,” said a brief post from the prosecutor’s office on its website and social media.
According to emergency services, shots were fired in the evening in four bars and at least twenty shots were fired in one of them. A person who was in a beer bar was killed.
Local media reported that two of the establishments attacked had been threatened by suspected offenders a few days earlier.
The gunshots sparked panic among the many people in those establishments, they reported.
The state attorney’s office in Quintana Roo, where the resort is located, said one person had been arrested.
In Cancun, a very touristy seaside resort with some 880,000 inhabitants, criminal groups operate to extort money from traders or to push them to get involved in drug trafficking.
Similar incidents have been reported at Caribbean resorts for more than a decade.
Mexico has been hit by a spiral of violence that has claimed some 340,000 lives — most attributed to organized crime — since 2006, when a controversial military counter-narcotics offensive was deployed.
A British businessman living in Playa del Carmen, south of Cancun, was shot dead in mid-March.
Attacks in tourist areas have increased, including a shooting on January 21 in a hotel complex near Cancun, which left two Canadians dead.