5 community police members reported killed in Mexico ambush

MEXICO CITY -- Five members of a vigilante-style community police force have been killed in an ambush in western Mexico, authorities and members of the group said.

Luz Sandoval, a member of the "community police" movement in the Michoacan state mountain town of Aquila, said Monday that 13 members of the group were on patrol when they were attacked on Sunday.

"The colleagues had gone to patrol the area, because that is where masked men had been sighted," said Sandoval. Unidentified assailants opened fire on them in a rural area, killing five and wounding eight, the state prosecutors' office said in a statement.

"The truck (the vigilantes were travelling in) was full of bullet holes," Sandoval said.

The area had long been dominated by the Knights Templar drug cartel, until armed civilians rose up in 2013 in a vigilante movement to fight it.

"We still don't know who attacked them. It could have been Templars or ex-Templars," Sandoval said.

The wounded are being treated at local hospitals. There was no information on their condition.

Aquila, a county of about 25,000 people, has been a point of conflict because the Knights Templar had been illegally exploiting the town's iron ore mines.

The Michoacan prosecutor's office said Monday it had seized 20 properties owned by leaders of the cartel, including five properties that belonged to the gang's deceased leader, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez. It said it also seized seven horses and three vehicles.

While many top leaders of the Knights Templar cartel have been captured or killed, some remain at large and the vigilante groups that helped weaken the cartel are now fighting among themselves. Other drug gangs are allegedly trying to move in to Michoacan or infiltrate the vigilante groups.