4 news photographers shot in southern Mexico, a case authorities consider attempted murder

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Unidentified assailants on Tuesday wounded four news photographers in the violence-wracked southern Mexican city of Chilpancingo, authorities said.

Prosecutors in the Pacific coast state of Guerrero said all four had been taken to a hospital, but did not say whether their wounds were serious.

All of the journalists appeared to work for local papers or news sites. State prosecutors said they consider it a case of attempted murder.

The press group Reporters Without Borders said the attack occurred just outside the local army barracks, as the photographers were returning from covering an event.

The shooting come just days after three journalists were abducted and held for days in Taxco, also in Guerrero state. They were later released, and there was no information on the motive for their abduction.

Guerrero has been the scene of deadly turf battles between around a dozen drug gangs and cartels.

The shootings and abductions mark some of the largest mass attacks on reporters in one place in Mexico since one day in early 2012, when the bodies of three news photographers were found dumped in plastic bags in a canal in the Gulf coast city of Veracruz. Those killings were blamed on the once-powerful Zetas drug cartel.

Earlier this month, a photographer for a newspaper in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez was found shot to death in his car. His death was the fifth instance of a journalist being killed in Mexico so far in 2023.

In the past five years alone, the Committee to Protect Journalists documented the killings of at least 54 journalists in Mexico.

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