MEXICO CITY – A senior U.S. official says there is strong circumstantial evidence that Mexican federal police who fired on a U.S. Embassy vehicle, wounding two CIA officers, were working for organized crime in a targeted assassination attempt.
"That&apos;s not a &apos;We&apos;re trying to shake down a couple people for a traffic violation sort of operation. That&apos;s a &apos;We are specifically trying to kill the people in this vehicle&apos;," a U.S. official familiar with the investigation told The Associated Press. "This is not a &apos;Whoops, we got the wrong people.&apos; "
The Mexican official said one line of investigation is that members of the Beltran Leyva Cartel were interested in attacking the people in the car because some of their lookouts had seen them passing through the area and presumed they were investigating the cartel. It&apos;s possible they didn&apos;t know they were Americans.
The rural road near Cuernavaca where the attack took place is known territory of the remnants of the Beltran Leyvas, a once-powerful cartel now run by Hector Beltran Leyva since the Navy killed his brother, drug lord Arturo Beltran Leyva, in Cuernavaca in late 2009. Beltran Leyva was once aligned with Mexico&apos;s powerful cartel, Sinaloa, headed by fugitive drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman. But the groups split in 2008 and continued government hits on Beltran Leyva leadership since then have splintered that cartel into small gangs warring for the area.
A Mexican federal police spokesman said last month that the officers may not have noticed the diplomatic plates. The official said police focused on the unusual sight of a bulletproof sport utility vehicle traveling at high speed on a rural road, not on the car&apos;s distinctive diplomatic plates.
But Raul Benitez, a security expert at Mexico&apos;s National Autonomous University, said Mexican military sources have told him that "the attack was not an error," and "the objective was to annihilate the three passengers in the car."
"I don&apos;t think we&apos;re yet in a position to say definitively who did it, who paid them and why they did it," the U.S. official said. "We have been assured repeatedly in private and in public that the government of Mexico will investigate this to the end and provide a final answer as to what occurred, and I think our posture at this stage is we take them at their word."
Mexico&apos;s federal police agency, which President Felipe Calderon calls the most professional and highly trained of the country&apos;s law enforcement, has been hit with allegations of wrongdoing in recent months. In August, all 348 officers assigned to security details at the Mexico City International Airport were replaced in the wake of a June shooting of three federal policemen, who were killed by a fellow officer believed to be involved in trafficking drugs through the terminal.
That could be the result of the break-up of larger cartels, said Andrew Selee of the Washington-based Mexico Institute, noting that historically drug traffickers didn&apos;t want the attention that a hit on U.S. personnel normally brings.
"The lower level leaders in the cartels are making decisions the more seasoned leaders wouldn&apos;t," he said. "It&apos;s the lower level leaders who feel empowered to order hits."