Mexico Hitmen Kill Eight at Prayer in Rehab Center

Eight people died and six others were seriously wounded, the Chihuahua state attorney general`s office said on Thursday.

Hooded gunmen dressed in black burst into a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center in northern Mexico, dragged patients out of a prayer session and shot them dead in an attack that killed eight people.

The hitmen, wearing body armor, forced their way into the center in the violent border city of Ciudad Juarez on Wednesday night, ordering the patients onto the floor and then picking out several men and killing them in the back patio.

"They came in and shouted at us to get down on the floor and not to look at them," a witness told local TV news as he fled the evangelist-funded rehab center with a 3-year-old boy in his arms.

But the first shootings caused panic and the patients tried to flee, prompting the gunmen to open fire on the stampede, witnesses said.

"They killed the person running behind us," the witness said.

Eight people died and six others were seriously wounded, the Chihuahua state attorney general's office said on Thursday.

The shootings were believed to be part of a drug gang feud. Police said the rehab center may have been suspected of protecting dealers from rival drug gangs.

Some 2,000 people have died this year in a drug war, mostly between rival gangs, for control of routes into the United States.

Around 40 people were killed in drug violence in Ciudad Juarez in two days this week, police say, taking the city's death toll to 795 so far this year and making it the deadliest front in Mexico's war on drug gangs.

Despite the deployment of 3,000 troops and federal police in Ciudad Juarez, which lies across from El Paso, Texas, gun battles have erupted on busy city streets and buildings have been set on fire as rival drug gangs fight a turf war.

Mexico's most-wanted man, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, is fighting local drug baron Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, boss of the Juarez cartel, for control of Ciudad Juarez and its lucrative smuggling corridor into the United States.