An off-duty US Air Force seargeant was among six people shot to death 4 November at a striptease bar in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez, the country’s most violent. Witnesses say masked gunmen entered the bar, targeted and shot the six victims several times, then left in the ensuing panic. A US military spokesman said it appears that drugs were being sold at the bar.
Three dozen US citizens have been murdered in the first six months of the year in Mexico, mostly along the border. More than 2,000 people have died in Ciudad Juarez since the beginning of the year as drug gangs fight for control of the lucrative drugs trade to the US. Houston & Texas News, New York Times, Reuters
© British Red Cross/Ash Sweeting/af-
Geneva, Switzerland and Washington DC (GenevaLunch) – The US military has begun a policy of handing over to the International Red Cross (ICRC) the names of detainees held in two camps in Iraq and Afghanistan, the New York Times reports. ICRC has broad access to all detainees held by the US military, but two camps that are part of the US Defense Department’s Special Operations programme are off-limits, until the detainees are formally transferred to a prison in either country. The military name for the camps is “temporary screening sites”, camps in which high-level combat detainees are interrogated. The new policy affects about 30 to 40 prisoners at any time in camps at Balad, Iraq and Bagram air force base in Afghanistan, according to the newspaper, which cites unnamed sources.
