Criminology and Psychology

Mexican police have discovered an air-conditioned drug-smuggling tunnel less than 60m from the US border in north-western Mexico, state police said yesterday. The director of police in Baja California state, Juan Miguel Guillen, said the 140m-long tunnel, 1.3m wide and 5m below ground, contained an electric rail for container transport, ventilation, lights and air conditioning.State officers arrested eight suspects after discovering the tunnel under a house during a patrol in Mexicali, across the border from Calexico in the US, Mr Guillen said. ''The detainees confessed that they were looking after the building where a drug tunnel was being built.'' Agents from the US Drug Enforcement Administration were excavating on their side of the the border to find the tunnel's exit point, he added.Most of the cocaine and marijuana that reaches the United States is trafficked through Mexico, and much of the country's extensive drug trade is controlled by cartels based in b...

"The bodies had been there for at least a week. They were spotted by local people out hunting," a municipal police spokesman said.The area where the bodies were found is one of many along the border that gangs use to smuggle marijuana and cocaine into the United States. Four people believed to be Americans were shot in the head and dumped in a notorious drug-smuggling area in northern Mexico near the California border, Mexican police said.Police in the beach town of Rosarito, across the border from San Diego, said they discovered the bodies of three men and a woman on Sunday in an abandoned car in a remote patch of scrubland near the Pacific coast.Police concluded the victims were US citizens because the vehicle had California licence plates, the men appeared to be black, the woman was white and a US driver's licence was found in the car, the spokesman said.Murders have jumped in Mexico this year, the bulk of them linked to a war between rival drug cartels and security fo...

Assassins blasted Ricardo Rosas Alvarado, a member of an elite state police force, with a blizzard of bullets pumped out of AK-47 assault rifles. Alvarado crumpled at the wheel of his sedan, yet another victim of the weapons known here as "goat's horns" because of their curved ammunition clips, and which can fire at a rate of 600 rounds per minute. The killing, Mexican authorities said, was a panorama of blood, shattered glass and torn metal that brutally showcased the firepower of Mexico's drug cartels. But that was just the warm-up. Two hours later, a small army of cartel hit men descended on a federal police office and bunkhouse in this crowded city at one of the world's busiest border crossings. None of the officers, who had recently been sent here to crush the drug gangs terrorizing the city, were killed in the hail of more than 1,200 bullets, authorities said. But police veterans understood the message delivered to the newcomers: "Welcome to Tijuana. Ou...