MONTERREY, Mexico – Imprisoned members of the hyper-violent Zetas drug cartel stabbed and bludgeoned 44 members of the rival Gulf cartel to death and then staged a mass escape, apparently with the help of prison authorities, officials in northern Mexico said Monday.
Rodrigo Medina, governor of the northern state of Nuevo Leon, said the prison's director and three other officials have been fired and are under investigation for purportedly helping in the escape. The same was done with 18 prison guards.
"Unfortunately, a group of traitors has set back the work of a lot of good police," Medina told a news conference. "The most important thing is to make sure that the people working on the inside are on the side of the law, and that they not be corrupted and collaborate with the criminals, as the investigations indicate they presumably did."
Medina did not say how the escape was carried out, but he noted that no members of any gang had broken into the prison to spring their colleagues, as has happened at other Mexican prisons. Nor were any firearms smuggled into the facility; all of the deaths apparently occurred with blunt instruments or improvised knives.
Medina confirmed that all 30 escaped inmates were linked to the Zetas cartel, a brutal gang founded by deserters from an elite Mexican military unit.
He did not say what crimes the escaped inmates had been convicted of
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