07 February 2008
Alfonso Cruz Cruz
Shooting
Bonifacio Cruz Santiago, the publisher of the weekly El Real, and his son, Alfonso Cruz Cruz, its editor, were fatally shot outside the town hall of Chimalhuacán, in the central state of Mexico.
According to local reports, the gunmen may have mistaken Bonifacio Cruz for a municipal legal advisor with whom the two journalists had an appointment. Yesterday morning, Bonifacio and Alfonso Cruz went to the office of Raymundo Olivares Díaz, the Chimalhuacán town hall's legal advisor and former head of an association of small landowners.
When they found that Olivares was not there, they went outside the town hall to wait, at which point two men in their 30s arrived and opened fire on them. The son was killed on the spot. The father died while being rushed to hospital.
Two municipal employees were wounded in the shooting. The local media suspect that the gunmen mistook Bonifacio Cruz for Olivares, who recently received death threats in connection with a land dispute between peasants.
But, when contacted by Reporters Without Borders, Chimalhuacán town hall spokesman Miguel Ángel González advised against jumping to conclusions. "We are not yet able to establish the motives for the murder," he said. The prosecutor's office of the state of Mexico has taken charge of the case.
