It was around 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, a time when personnel from the Baja California Prosecutor’s Office for Combating Kidnapping were still patrolling the offices of the Playas de Tijuana delegation. That was when a drone attacked the building with plastic bottles filled with metal and gunpowder, which detonated in the courtyard of the Public Ministry office. Images shared on social media showed the impact of these homemade explosive devices, which damaged three employee cars and an official vehicle. No injuries have been reported. The incident prompted State Prosecutor María Elena Andrade to call a press conference at midnight (local time). This Thursday, the Mexican Government’s Security Cabinet announced the deployment of a coordinated operation with authorities from all three levels of government to secure the area.
A few hours before Andrade’s presentation, the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana issued an alert. “Initial reports indicate that the attack involved explosives, with multiple explosions reported,” the statement stated. The agency recommended that U.S. citizens avoid areas near “continuous police presence,” as well as seek information from local media and inform their families of their health status.
The border city of Tijuana is a target territory for criminal groups seeking to control the area for trafficking to the United States. Andrade noted that the attack was a reaction to the investigative work that, he claimed, has led to the capture of criminal leaders and the dismantling of criminal groups in the state of Baja California. “No attack will stop the investigative work or the commitment to justice,” he stated.
Wednesday’s attack is the third against the state Attorney General’s Office facilities in the last month. Between September 20 and 21, the Public Ministry was attacked in Ensenada and Tijuana, where several armed individuals set fire to several vehicles (the exact number was not reported). Andrade then called the attack “cowardly” and stated that the agency arrested three people, without specifying where. “We continue working to find the whereabouts of those responsible, in addition to the three detainees. It wasn’t an attack on Ensenada, it was on our institution, due to the work we’ve done,” she told the media on September 23.
“We immediately confirmed [the attack], since the same personnel who made the report to C5 were on duty,” she explained. Andrade reported that the main damage was to the car bodies and windows: “It wasn’t total damage, but it was considerable, because the vehicle windows need to be replaced. Not all of them, but the side or rear windows.”
The prosecutor asserted that the information shared on social media contained confusing information and tried to refute messages claiming the explosives were Molotov cocktails or gunshots. “They’re made of plastic bottles containing nails, pellets, and bullet fragments. They carry them with the drone at a very long distance and activate them,” he explained. However, he did affirm that at first they could have been mistaken for another type of attack: “Gunshots were heard.”
This Thursday, the Baja California Citizen Council for Public Safety requested the presence of Mexico’s Secretary of Security, Omar García Harfuch, in Tijuana. “The [Baja California] authorities have been overwhelmed.”
Source: elpais
