Two attacks by suspected members of the Los Zetas drug cartel on Mexican army soldiers and civilians in this northern industrial metropolis left at least five people dead and six wounded

Two attacks by suspected members of the Los Zetas drug cartel on Mexican army soldiers and civilians in this northern industrial metropolis left at least five people dead and six wounded, officials said.

In the first attack, a group of armed men aboard eight SUVs fired at a military patrol and two state police units, a source with the federal Attorney General’s Office said.

The soldiers were drawn into an ambush after coming under fire from gunmen in one vehicle. Upon pursuing those initial assailants, the soldiers and police reached a highway where they became surrounded by other attackers in seven SUVs, the source said.

The Defense Secretariat said that attack occurred Friday on the Monterrey-Saltillo highway near the town of Escopedo, in the northern part of the Monterrey metropolitan area.

The assailants fired “with a grenade launcher, hitting a bus,” the secretariat said, adding that one civilian was killed and five were wounded – two civilians and three soldiers.

The soldiers reported that several of the hit men who were traveling in the SUV used as a decoy also were wounded, but they were taken away from the scene by their accomplices.

After seizing the vehicle, the soldiers confiscated three rifles, caps with the word Zetas, ammunition clips, grenades and ammunition.

About two hours later, a group of hit men arrived in two SUVs at a neighborhood in the town of Guadalupe, also part of the Monterrey metro area, where they killed a local drug dealer and three other men and wounded an adolescent.

For her part, Guadalupe Mayor Ivonne Alvarez said 23 municipal police were arrested by army soldiers for allegedly collaborating with organized crime.

Nuevo Leon, whose capital is Monterrey, and neighboring Tamaulipas state have been rocked by a wave of violence unleashed by drug traffickers battling for control of smuggling routes into the United States.

More than 1,000 people, including about 80 police officers, have died in the violence in Nuevo Leon in the past year.

The violence has intensified in the two border states since the appearance in Monterrey in early 2010 of giant banners heralding an alliance of the Gulf, Sinaloa and La Familia drug cartels against Los Zetas, a band of special forces deserters turned outlaws.

Nationwide, more than 36,000 people have died in drug-related violence in Mexico since late 2006, when President Felipe Calderon took office and deployed tens of thousands of army soldiers and Federal Police to drug war hotspots.

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