Violence in Mexico City Airport - Take care

A French researcher Christopher Augur 48, an expert in bio-molecular chemistry was en route to the University of Mexico at Iztapalapa. He had arrived in Mexico on 31st January. and changed some money at at the Mexico City Airport- Benito Juarez International Airport. He had four thousand 800 Euros and 370 dollars on his person.

A University car had been dispatched to pick him up, this was intercepted and stopped by three cars and six people got out broke into his car stole his money and shot him dead.

This was not the first time such an assault has happened and the are suggestions of involvement by law enforcement agencies.

Assistant city prosecutor Luis Vasquez said a total of 17 such robberies of people leaving the Mexican capital's airport have been reported since March 2008. The attacks appear to be the work of two or more gangs, or one organization with several cells.

Vasquez said the victims in four of the cases were foreigners: an English man, two Ecuadoreans and a man from Guinea. The rest were Mexican citizens.

Victims in all the attacks were apparently followed in vehicles after they exchanged money at the city's airport and robbed outside the terminal.

Although not directly related there were more than 5,300 drug-related murders in Mexico last year, double the year before, but only a tiny handful have been prosecuted and arrested.

Drug trafficking is still by far the biggest component of Mexico’s economy, estimated at US $60 billion a year. The year end 2008 report of the US Army Joint Forces Command singles out Mexico and Pakistan as the two nations in the world in the most danger of ‘rapid and sudden collapse’ into chaos.