Mexico Investigates Police Massacre Claims

The Mexican authorities are looking into claims that police fired on and killed 16 unarmed civilians in January.

The inquiry by the country's police internal affairs and the judiciary is the latest into abuse allegations in connection with the country's security forces.

The revelation from interior minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong came a day after a report from a leading journalist claimed that police opened fire on a group of people carrying nothing more than sticks on 6 January in Apatzingan, a city in the troubled western state of Michoacan.

Laura Castellanos' report contradicts official accounts that nine people died in crossfire during the shootout between police and former rural militiamen.

"We hope that the attorney general's office will draw its own conclusions and make them known," Mr Osorio Chong said, adding police were investigating themselves.

"We are waiting for the results of the investigation and, with that, we will know what really happened that day in Apatzingan," he told reporters.

Mexico's National Security Commission has given prosecutors a video sent anonymously that appears to show "an excessive use of force or abuse of authority by federal police officers" in Apatzingan.

However, local government envoy, Alfredo Castillo, has defended his account of what happened.

"I'm at peace and completely certain" of his account, said Mr Castillo, who stepped down two weeks after the shootings, adding that whatever appeared in the video was "probably taken out of context".

Ms Castellanos's report, based on 39 anonymous witness accounts with videos and audio recordings, accuses officers of opening fire in two incidents.

In the first one, the report said, police shot at around 100 people demonstrating in front of city hall in the early hours of the morning, with some police shouting: "Kill them like dogs!"

The second shooting happened hours later, when police started shooting at a dozen vehicles carrying people who were chasing a police convoy in the hope of freeing their comrades, the report said.

At least 44 people were arrested.

The violence happened amid plans to dissolve Michoacan's "rural force," a group of vigilantes, made deputies after they rose up against the Knights Templar drug cartel.

President Enrique Pena Nieto, who was elected on the promise to gain control of Mexico's drug cartels, is already under attack over an alleged army massacre of gang suspects in central Mexico last year, and the presumed slaughter of 43 students at the hands of a municipal police-backed drug cartel in southern Guerrero state.