Mexico’s top security official said arrests have been made in the horrific massacre of three Mormon moms and six children last week by suspected cartel gunmen.
Security Secretary Alfonso Durazo declined to specify the number of arrests or elaborate on any cartel affiliation when he made the announcement Sunday.
The deadly ambush unfolded Nov. 4 on a rural road in the northern Mexico state of Sonora.
The nine victims held dual U.S. and Mexican citizenship and were members of a fundamentalist Mormon colony called La Mora that’s not affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
David Langford lost his wife Dawna Ray Langford and two sons, ages 11 and 2, in the bloodshed.
He moved his second wife Margaret and the rest of their large family up to Arizona after a funeral at La Mora last week.
“I think a lot of people are leaving for good. They don’t want anything to do with (La Mora) anymore. And there are some people leaving temporarily, just to see how it goes, if things calm down,” Langford’s sister Leah Langford-Staddon told the Daily News.
“Some people feel we were intentionally targeted. We think they knew who they were shooting. Some people feel it was political. There’s a lot of speculation. We don’t know. Who knows if we ever will,” she said.
The daylight ambush was the latest in an escalating series of violent acts attributed to cartel forces.
Authorities previously said the moms, driving in large SUVs, may have been mistaken for cartel members amid the bloody turf war between La Línea, an enforcer unit of the Juárez cartel based in Chihuahua, and Los Salazar, a splinter group affiliated with the Sinaloa cartel.
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