Mexico gunmen slay six in attack on law firm

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Unidentified gunmen burst into a law firm in the western Mexican city of Guadalajara and killed six people, officials said Friday, in what appeared to be the latest round of drug killings.

Five men and one woman died in the shooting Thursday afternoon at the office of the Rangel Garcia y Asociados law firm, which Mexican media said had high-profile drug smugglers among its clients.

Guadalajara is Mexico's second-biggest city and its colonial center is popular with tourists.

"We know that three or four of the deceased were attorneys," an official at the Jalisco state attorney general's office said, declining to be quoted by name. He said two other women were seriously injured in the attack.

Brutal killings by drug gang hitmen have continued apace this year, totaling well over 300, as troops and federal police hunt down cartel members in a nationwide crackdown that has intensified turf wars between the gangs.

The bodies from Thursday's shooting were found with their hands tied and had been killed with close-range shots to the head, according to Mexican newspapers.

The daily Reforma said the law firm handled several cases linked to drug smuggling and said one of its clients was the son of Mexico's most-wanted trafficker, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, head of the Sinaloa cartel.

Guzman's son, Archivaldo Ivan Guzman Salazar, was sentenced last month to five years in prison for money laundering.

The firm is also believed to handle the defense of General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, a former anti-narcotics unit chief who was arrested in 1997 and sentenced to 40 years in prison after being found to be on the payroll of the Juarez drug cartel.

Calderon sent out some 25,000 soldiers and federal police to clamp down on the country's violent drug cartels after taking office in Dec. 2006.

Drug violence killed more than 2,500 people last year, and this year has seen a spurt in killings in and around the northern border city of Tijuana. (Reporting by Miguel Angel Gutierrez and Cyntia Barrera Diaz; Editing by Catherine Bremer and Bill Trott)