The police chief of Poncitlan, Jalisco was shot dead in front of his home on the southern outskirts of Guadalajara on February 8.
Bernardo Garcia Zetina, 46, was killed around 7 p.m. when several gunmen pulled up outside his house in El Briseño, Zapopan and opened fire.
Experts from the Jalisco Institute of Forensic Sciences found several nine-millimeter shell casings and 20 cartridges from an AK-47 assault rifle at the scene of the crime.
Garcia served as chief of police in the municipality of Poncitlan, about 50 kilometers southeast of Guadalajara and just north of Lake Chapala.
Garcia is the latest of several Jalisco police chiefs to have been targeted in the last two years.
Most recently, the Hostotipaquillo Police Chief Lucio Rosales Astorga was murdered on January 29. This came just days after Tlajomulco Police Chief Francisco Chacon was shot dead in San Sebastian El Grande on January 25.
Sara del Refugio Chavez Rangel, the police chief of San Miguel El Alto, suffered non-fatal gunshot wounds on January 7, while on November 27 last year, Noe Juarez Enriquez of Jalisco’s Magdalena municipality survived an assassination attempt in which one of his bodyguards was killed.
On October 30, 2012, San Martin Hidalgo’s police chief Casimiro Guerrero Zarate was shot over 100 times on his way to work, two weeks after Puerto Vallarta’s police chief Roberto Rodriguez Preciado emerged unharmed after being shot at and targeted with grenades on October 15.
Earlier last year, Magdalena Police Chief Raul Hinojosa Saad was shot dead along with two other municipal police officers on August 22, just three months after his predecessor Victor Manuel Hernandez Sotelo was murdered in Guadalajara on May 21.
The car of Guadalajara Police Chief Marco Antonio Castañeda was shot at in November 2011, but he survived without injury, while in July 2011 Quitupan Police Chief Jorge Mario Villa Barajas was killed, with his body later found in Michoacan.