PHOENIX
(Reuters) - A Border Patrol agent was
shot dead and another wounded when they came under fire early on Tuesday while
responding to a tripped ground sensor in a drug smuggling corridor in Arizona,
near the border with Mexico, authorities said.
Authorities
said three agents were on foot about 5 miles north of the border when gunfire
erupted well before daybreak but provided few additional details on the
circumstances of the violence.
"As
they were walking up the trail, they reported taking gunfire," Cochise
County Sheriff's spokeswoman Carol Capas said.
"We have unknown suspect or suspects at this point."
The shooting
marks the fourth death of a Border Patrol agent in Arizona in less than two
years and was likely to reignite concerns over border security in a state
neighboring Mexico that
is already at the forefront of the national immigration debate.
"Flags
will be lowered in honor of the slain agent. Elected officials will vow to find
those responsible. Arizonans and Americans will grieve, and they should. But
this ought not only be a day of tears," Governor Jan
Brewer said
in a statement.
"There
should be anger, too. Righteous anger - at the kind of evil that causes sorrow
this deep, and at the federal failure and political stalemate that has left our
border unsecured and our Border Patrolin harm's way," added
Brewer, a vocal foe of President Barack Obama's administration on immigration.
Brewer,
citing what she described as a federal failure to secure Arizona's southern
border, signed a broad immigration crackdown into law in 2010 to try to crack
down on the flow of illegal immigrants into the state where an estimated
360,000 undocumented people live.
Critics of
the law, which include a requirement that police check the immigration status
of anyone they stop and suspect of being in the country illegally, have said it
could lead to racial profiling.
GROUND
SENSORS
The shooting
took place near the border town of Naco, southeast of Tucson, which remains a
corridor for marijuana trafficking and human smuggling, despite the
construction of a tall, steel fence along the border.
"We
need to redouble our efforts to secure the border and ensure the safety of Border
Patrol agents," U.S. Democratic Representative Ron
Barber, who represents the southern Arizona district where the shooting
occurred, said in a statement.
Sheriff's
deputies were called to the scene at 1:33 a.m. local time (4:33 a.m. EDT/0833
GMT) and found one agent dead and another with non-life-threatening injuries,
Capas said. A third was unharmed. FBI agents were also investigating.
The Border
Patrol identified the slain agent as Nicholas Ivie, 30, who was originally from
Utah and had worked for the agency since 2008.
The agents
had been responding to a sensor, which picks up on movement or vibrations in
areas authorities suspect are used by drug traffickers and illegal immigrants.
When an alert is triggered, agents have the option to respond.
Capas said
the agents who were shot were assigned to the Brian A. Terry Border Patrol Station, named after an
agent whose 2010 death in the line of duty in Arizona borderlands was linked to
a botched U.S. operation to track guns smuggled to Mexico.
In that
case, two guns tracked by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives in the "Fast and
Furious" sting operation, which let
weapons slip into Mexico, were retrieved from the spot where Terry died in a
shoot-out with bandits. It was unclear if the weapons were used in his murder.
Separately,
two Border Patrol agents were killed last year in a accident during a car chase
with smugglers near Gila Bend, near Phoenix.
(Reporting
by David Schwartz in Phoenix, Tim Gaynor in Mexico City, and Daniel Trotta in
New York; Writing by Cynthia Johnston; Editing by Stacey Joyce and Cynthia
Osterman)
0 comments:
Post a Comment