A senior US official says there is strong circumstantial evidence that Mexican federal police who fired on a US Embassy vehicle, wounding two CIA officers, were working for organized crime in a targeted assassination attempt.

Meanwhile, a Mexican official with knowledge of the case confirmed on Tuesday that prosecutors are investigating whether the Beltran Leyva Cartel was behind the Aug. 24 ambush.

The Mexican official said that is among several lines of investigation into the shooting of an armored SUV that was clearly marked with diplomatic license plates on a rural road near Cuernavaca south of Mexico City. Federal police, at times battered by allegations of infiltration and corruption by drug cartels, have said the shooting was a case of mistaken identity as officers were looking into the kidnapping of a government employee in that area.

"That's not a 'we're trying to shake down a couple people for a traffic violation sort of operation. That's a 'we are specifically trying to kill the people in this vehicle'," a US official familiar with the investigation told The Associated Press. "This is not a 'whoops, we got the wrong people.' "

Photos of the gray Toyota SUV, a model known to be used by Drug Enforcement Administration agents and other US Embassy employees working in Mexico, showed it riddled with heavy gunfire. The US Embassy called the attack an "ambush."

When asked by the AP if the Mexican federal police officers involved in the shooting were tied to organized crime, the US official said, "The circumstantial evidence is pretty damn strong."

Both the US and Mexican officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the diplomatic issue.

A federal police on Tuesday maintained the position that their agents fired on the vehicle by mistake, thinking it belonged to a band of kidnappers they were pursuing, according to a spokesman who was not authorized to speak on the record.

The US State Department declined to discuss details.

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Editor's Note: Another Obama foreign policy success...


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