Gunmen have killed the police administrative director in the violent Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, the latest high-profile killing in Mexico's drug war, police said on Wednesday. Silvia Molina was shot outside her house on Monday night by suspected drug hitmen, the first public official in Ciudad Juarez's city police force to be targeted.'She was shot 10 times as she was parking her car,' a police spokesman said. Molina's body was found with a message signed by suspected drug hitmen who said they were working for Mexico's most wanted man, Joaquin 'Shorty' Guzman.
Molina's administrative team and the director of the city police academy resigned on Tuesday in protest at her murder, temporarily leaving the city police force without officials to pay salaries and deal with accounting issues.
About 460 people have been killed in Ciudad Juarez this year -- the greatest concentration of drug killings in the country. Guzman's drug gangs from northwestern Sinaloa state are battling the local Juarez cartel for control of smuggling routes to the United States. Ciudad Juarez is across the border from El Paso, Texas.