Police chief arrested over massacre of Mormon family in Mexico

A police chief has been arrested in connection with the massacre of three women and six children in Mexico.

The women and children were from families of Mormon origin in Sonora state and they were killed by suspected drug cartel hitmen on 4 November.

Mexican media outlets reported that Fidel Alejandro Villegas, police chief of the municipality of Janos, which is in the neighbouring state of Chihuahua, has been arrested.

He is suspected of having ties to organised crime but how he is alleged to have been involved in the November murders is not clear.

A number of other suspects have also been arrested.

The nine victims were dual Mexican-US citizens and part of the extended LeBaron Mormon family which settled in the plains and hills of Sonora state decades ago near the US border.

They had left the US because their polygamist beliefs were illegal there but in Mexico their main occupation – farming – has often been under threat due to organised crime.

The convoy, which comprised three women and 14 children, was attacked after becoming caught up in a dispute between local drug cartels battling for control along the border between Chihuahua and Sonora, authorities said.

According to survivors of the massacre, three cars in the convoy were shot at and one was set on fire.

The gunmen killed one woman, Christina Langford Johnson, after she jumped out of her vehicle and waved her hands to show she was not a threat, according to family members.

The six dead children were four boys and two girls, including eight-month-old twins. The others were aged two-and-a-half years, 10, 11 and 12.

Among the children who survived, many were seriously wounded, including a baby shot in the chest and a four-year-old shot in the back.

There were more than 200 shell casings found around the ambush scene, most of them from assault rifles.

One of the survivors, Devin Langford, 13, escaped and walked for about 14 miles to La Mora, where the family lived, for help after hiding his wounded siblings in bushes and covering them with branches.

The killers were apparently members of the Juarez drug cartel and its armed wing, La Linea – The Line – whose gunmen had entered Sinaloa cartel territory and set up an armed outpost on a hilltop and an ambush further up the road.

The Juarez cartel apparently wanted to demonstrate its control over the road into Chihuahua and it was this group that the Mormon family’s vehicles drove into.

Gang violence in Mexico has killed more than 200,000 people in the past 12 years.