Drug hitmen kill 17 at party in Mexico

Drug hitmen have stormed a birthday party and killed 17 people, including the person who was celebrating their birthday in the northern Mexican city of Torreon on Sunday.

Gunmen in five SUVs drove up to the party in a walled patio and garden on the outskirts of the city in Coahuila state across from Texas, smashed down the door and opened fire with automatic rifles on party-goers.

"They came in, opened fire and shot against everything that moved," said an official at the prosecutor's office who declined to be identified. Photos showed blood-stained floor tiles, overturned chairs and musical instruments by a beer tent abandoned as the people in their 20s and 30s ran in panic.

The prosecutor's office in Coahuila said eighteen people were injured in the attack and taken to a Torreon hospital. The party garden was strewn with more than 100 bullet casings. No arrests have been made and Mexico's attorney general's office has blamed organised crime for the attack.

The shootings come a few days after a drug gang detonated a car bomb in Ciudad Juarez, killing four people in the first attack of its kind in Mexico's drug war. Federal police blamed La Linea, the armed wing of the powerful Juarez cartel, for the car bomb and Mexico's security ministry said it was retaliation for the arrest of a cartel member.

In Torreon, it was not clear which cartel was responsible for the attack but the area, a key transit point along smuggling routes into the United States, is being fought over by the Sinaloa cartel led by Mexico's most-wanted man, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, and the Zetas gang from northeastern Mexico.

Once quiet northern industrial cities such as Torreon and nearby Monterrey have seen a surge in drug killings in the past six months as the Zetas fight the Sinaloans and the Gulf cartel that controls much of the smuggling routes into Texas.

The attacks highlight the challenges facing President Felipe Calderon's new interior minister, who took up his job this week facing criticism that he lacked experience to deal with drug cartels. More than 26,000 people have died in drug violence across Mexico since Calderon took office and launched a crackdown on cartels in December 2006.