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AFP - A gunman opened fire in a Mexico City Starbucks coffee shop, killing an ex-police chief involved in drug-related corruption and wounding two other people, authorities said.

"At around 11:30 am (1730 GMT) there was a shootout in a Starbucks... resulting in one man killed, another man wounded and a woman also wounded," an official with the city's attorney general's office said.

The gunman opened fire with a handgun and then fled in a waiting van, which police later found abandoned, the official added.

The dead man was identified as former police chief inspector Edgar Bayardo del Villar, who was arrested in October 2008 on suspicion he was a paid informant of the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel.

After a short stint in jail, Bayardo was placed in a witness protection program earlier this year and lately worked with authorities in uncovering corrupt government officials, another attorney general office's official told AFP.

The Reforma daily said Bayardo had been living in the United States under the protection of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, but returned to Mexico City in March and was placed under heavy military escort to testify in a drug trafficking trial.

Meanwhile, 34 patrol cars were set on fire Tuesday in the northern border city of Tijuana by a group of men who broke into a police parking lot and knocked the security guard unconscious, Tijuana Fire Department chief Rafael Carillo told AFP.

The police cruisers were doused with gasoline before they were set aflame, said another police official who added that only six cars were damaged beyond repair.

More than 14,000 people have been killed in Mexico in drug-related violence since 2006, when President Felipe Calderon took office and deployed 50,000 troops to fight violence.


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