Rebels Kill 5 in Attack on Mexico Police

Five police officers were gunned down in southern Mexico and another was killed on the outskirts of the capital amid a renewed campaign of guerrilla attacks by the shadowy rebels of the Popular Revolutionary Army.

The bloodiest of this week’s ambushes--for which the masked, well-armed rebel group claimed responsibility Friday--occurred in the impoverished southern state of Oaxaca. That was also the area of fierce rebel attacks that stunned this nation in August.

A spokesman for the state attorney general said 10 to 15 gunmen opened fire Thursday night on a police patrol that stopped to investigate a flaming barricade, which the gunmen apparently put on a highway about 15 miles east of the Oaxacan state capital.

On Friday, the Popular Revolutionary Army--which is known by its Spanish acronym, EPR--hand-delivered to an Oaxaca newspaper a statement claiming responsibility for the attack.

“We wiped out the police patrol,” the statement said, to “let the people be aware that we will not allow any injustice.”

The same day as that ambush--about 200 miles to the north, on the outskirts of Mexico City--masked gunmen in military uniforms attacked another police patrol, wounding a motorcycle officer who had stopped their car. Moments later, the gunmen fired dozens of rounds from automatic-weapons at a state police station, killing one officer and wounding another.

A state spokesman Friday confirmed the attack but declined to speculate whether the rebel group was also behind it.

The federal government has not acknowledged the rebels’ claim of responsibility.

In both ambushes, however, witnesses said the gunmen used AK-47 assault rifles. That is a signature weapon of the Marxist-style rebel force, which first appeared in a fusillade of automatic weapons at a June 28 memorial service for slain peasants in the state of Guerrero.

Thursday’s ambushes were the bloodiest attacks since late August, when raids by the rebels on police and military targets left at least 19 dead across southern Mexico.

The assaults also followed reports Tuesday that at least two soldiers were killed in the town of Teotihuacan, a popular tourist site with ancient pyramids near Mexico City.

The attacks came after the EPR said last Saturday that its unilateral cease-fire had expired. There had been no such ambushes in the month since the EPR said it would suspend its “people’s war” to foster peaceful elections in Guerrero.

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This week’s attacks began with a midnight drive-by assault on an empty federal prosecutors’ office in Guerrero early in the week and climaxed in Thursday night’s roadside ambush in Oaxaca.

Authorities have been hunting the EPR in Oaxaca and elsewhere in southern Mexico since the late August attacks.

When state police stopped to investigate the burning roadblock at 8:40 p.m. Thursday, said Noel Cruz, spokesman for Oaxaca’s state attorney general, gunmen attacked from behind roadside bushes.

After the shooting, in which four police officers died at the scene and a fifth died from his wounds early Friday, the gunmen disappeared, fleeing in two directions. State police were scouring the area Friday, but there have been no arrests.

President Ernesto Zedillo and his aides have played down the threat from the EPR, a group they say is rooted in 1960s-era urban radical movements.

The group has fewer than 500 hard-core members, Zedillo aides say. But they acknowledge that the EPR is well-armed, well-organized and well-financed, largely through kidnappings that the government suspects included an estimated $30-million ransom paid for the release of Mexican businessman Alfredo Harp Helu in 1994.

Zedillo, who has said his government will not negotiate with the EPR, calls them “terrorists” who lack the popular support claimed by the Zapatista National Liberation Army rebels in Chiapas.

The government began negotiating with the armed Mayan Zapatistas soon after their brief but bloody Jan. 1, 1994, uprising, which left about 145 people dead in two weeks of fighting.

But Zedillo has deployed the Mexican army to track and dismantle the EPR, which has no apparent link to the Zapatistas.