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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | June 2007 
Mexican State Lawmaker Slain
 Sean Mattson - Houston Chronicle
| | Forensics investigators check a car at a shooting scene Tuesday near Monterrey, Mexico. Gunmen opened fire on the police headquarters, wounding five people, officials said. (Monica Rueda/AP) |
Shooting appears to be latest in wave of drug killings shaking Monterrey.
Monterrey, Mexico — A Nuevo Leon state lawmaker was shot dead Tuesday at a busy downtown intersection in an apparent drug-related killing, police said.
Mario Cesar Rios Gutierrez, 44, a legislator for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, was killed and his driver wounded about 2 p.m., a police spokesman said.
It was the latest in a wave of killings that has rattled Monterrey, an industrial metropolis 140 miles south of Laredo that until this year had largely escaped regional drug violence.
The shooting happened outside Monterrey's city hall, in the heart of the city's tourist and hotel zone and just a few blocks from the state capitol.
Rios and his driver, who was not identified, were rushed to a nearby hospital, where the lawmaker later died, police said.
Police had no immediate reports of arrests in what was at least the 80th organized crime-related killing in the state this year, according to media tallies.
Rios "had a record," said the police spokesman on the customary condition of anonymity.
Rios was arrested in 1986 for narcotics possession, the newspaper El Norte noted in April when reporting on the arrest of his younger brother Luis Lauro Rios Gutierrez.
Police said the younger Rios was captured with cocaine.
Reached by phone, a stunned fellow state legislator, also with the PRI, declined to comment on the killing.
State police investigators said they would not say more about the killing until today.
Once largely insulated from the drug gang turf wars that have killed 4,500 people in Mexico since 2004, Monterrey has been wracked by drug-related slayings this year, including the deaths of 20 law enforcement officers.
In February, a federal congressman from Nuevo Laredo in the neighboring state of Tamaulipas, ex-Mayor Horacio Garza Garza, was wounded and his driver killed in an ambush near the airport there.
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