CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (AFP) - The body of a deputy US marshal who had been on the run has been found in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, considered Mexico's crime capital, police officials said.
Vicente Paul Bustamante's body was found Wednesday and identified early Thursday, an investigative official in the northern state of Chihuahua, where Ciudad Juarez is located, told AFP.
Police officers in El Paso, Texas, just across the border said that Bustamante had been suspended from his duties and under possible investigation from US authorities, without providing details.
Bustamante, who had served as a policeman for 17 years, was shot execution-style in the back of the head before being dumped in a canal.
Drug-related violence is raging in northern Mexico, and Ciudad Juarez saw over 1,650 murders in 2008, out of about 5,300 people killed nationwide.
Some 8,500 soldiers have been deployed there to confront feuding drug cartels that are fighting a bloody war to control trafficking to the United States, the world's biggest consumer of cocaine.
Elsewhere in Chihuahua, four people were killed Thursday and late Wednesday.
About 5,300 people were killed in mostly drug-related violence in 2008, and over 1,100 have been killed so far this year in Mexico, despite the deployment of some 36,000 soldiers throughout the country to quell the unrest.
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