Mexico Soldiers Accused in Drug Agent Killings : Narcotics: Deaths of 7 officers in shootout had been called a tragic mistake. Probers now believe otherwise.

Scores of Mexican soldiers deliberately opened fire and killed seven federal drug agents at a clandestine Veracruz airstrip earlier this month to protect a Colombian cocaine shipment, U.S. and Mexican officials now believe.

The attack had been characterized as a tragic mistake. But autopsies of the victims revealed that two of the slain Mexican agents were shot in the back at close range and a third was shot point-blank in the mouth, leaving powder burns, sources said Tuesday.

“They gave them the coup de grace there at the end,” a U.S. drug enforcement official said.

The Americans and Mexicans had been cooperating in tracking the shipment of cocaine from South America to Veracruz.

The attack on the planeload of Mexican police agents, which lasted for more than two hours on the morning of Nov. 7, was filmed from another government aircraft that circled overhead, providing key evidence that has been viewed by U.S. and Mexican officials.

The three traffickers under pursuit by the Mexican agents escaped and remain at large. Sources said that a Mexican army general, based in the area, is suspected of overseeing an operation that offered the smugglers protection and resulted in the attack on the police.

The assault brought a bloody end to an anti-drug mission that began when a U.S. Customs Service radar surveillance plane guided the two planes to the airstrip, pursuing the traffickers’ aircraft, sources said.

After Police Cmdr. Eduardo Salazar Carrillo climbed out of the government plane--a Beech King Air with the federal attorney general’s insignia on its tail--and began to inspect the traffickers’ Cessna, soldiers opened fired on him. That began the fusillade that was fatal to seven officers, although three others from the government plane, including Salazar, survived, the sources said.

An official account of the incident issued that day by the Mexican Defense Ministry and the attorney general’s office explained that the seven agents were killed by mistake during a shootout between the two anti-drug forces in the predawn confusion. Other bulletins issued by the Mexican government described the government craft as unmarked and said the federal police started shooting at the soldiers about 1,200 feet away.

But the U.S. and Mexican sources say that compelling evidence indicates that the soldiers attacked intentionally, that only one police agent fired a weapon and that some drug agents were shot at such close range that there could have been no doubt as to their identity as police officers.

“This was no accident,” a furious senior Bush Administration official said. Added another senior U.S. official: “There is a strong belief that the Mexican army is lying through its teeth on this.”

The incident has raised fears among U.S. and Mexican officials of a fracture in the 18-month-old partnership between Washington and Mexico City over the use of U.S. Customs planes to help Mexican officials interdict drug shipments.

The arrangement relies extensively on Mexican army forces and could be jeopardized if drug corruption in the military has penetrated as deeply as the clash between soldiers and police suggests, the officials warned. But U.S. and Mexican officials have gone out of their way to play down the attack and stress that their cooperation will continue.

Under orders from President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the Defense Ministry has asked the government’s National Human Rights Commission to investigate the deaths. “The president wanted an impartial investigation of this,” said a Mexican source.

In Washington, spokesmen for Customs, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the State Department and other U.S. agencies declined official comment on the incident and referred inquiries to the Mexican government. The Mexican attorney general’s office declined to comment, saying it will wait for the Human Rights Commission’s investigation. Defense Ministry officials could not be reached for comment.

But an emerging picture of the incident, based on extensive interviews with U.S. and Mexican sources, provided this account of a brutal, deliberate assault on the police agents at the clandestine airstrip near Tlalixcoyan, 25 miles south of Veracruz:

American drug officials based at the DEA’s El Paso intelligence center spotted the Cessna off the coast of Nicaragua as they monitored radar signals from an airborne Customs plane Nov. 7.

The U.S. authorities alerted Mexican drug agents. The Mexican attorney general’s office, which oversees the federal judicial police, dispatched two aircraft to pursue the cocaine-laden Cessna from Mexico’s southern border to its landing on the airstrip near Tlalixcoyan at about 6:15 a.m.

A truck with eight barrels of fuel was waiting on the ground for the drug plane at the strip, surrounded by more than 100 Mexican soldiers. Despite the soldiers’ presence, two men and a woman escaped from the Cessna, discovered to be transporting more than 800 pounds of cocaine.

The first of the government planes--the King Air with government insignia--landed about half an hour after the drug plane. As Salazar inspected the Cessna, the soldiers fired on him and his agents.

Shortly after the shooting began, the attorney general’s office in Mexico City advised the Veracruz army commander, Gen. Alfredo Moran Acevedo, that his troops were firing on federal police. But the soldiers continued firing for another two hours.

The army has asserted that the police agents refused to identify themselves, and a senior U.S. official said that question “remains in some dispute.” But the weekly magazine Proceso reported that the surviving pilots and police commander have given sworn statements that the agents identified themselves by shouting.

U.S. and Mexican sources said that when the second government plane landed at about 8:30 a.m., the soldiers took the pilot and agents into custody while continuing to shoot at officers from the first plane.

“It is unclear whether the seven agents were killed before or after the second plane landed,” said a source. But he said that two of the agents had bullet wounds in their backs and had been shot from a distance of less than 12 yards. A third agent had been shot in the mouth at close range, he said. Only one of the victims showed evidence of having fired his weapon.

In Washington, U.S. officials said the Mexican drug agents killed during the raid had been working closely with the DEA for months as part of the new response team, which relied heavily on the radar intelligence gathered by military and U.S. Customs radar planes operating off the Mexican coast. “People around here are really pissed off,” one DEA official said. “This is a story that really should be told.”

But the Administration spokesmen who refused to comment directly on the incident went out of their way--when told that others had provided detailed accounts of the shooting--to praise the Mexican government in what seemed an attempt to forestall any rupture in relations.

Miller reported from Mexico City and Jehl from Washington.