Fire kills 12 people who were reportedly locked up inside drug rehab center in Mexico

A fire in a drug rehabilitation center in the violence-plagued Mexican state of Guanajuato killed 12 people and injured at least three others, authorities said Sunday.

The fire broke out early Sunday in the town of San Jose Iturbe, where the municipal government said it was still investigating what caused the deadly blaze.

“We express our solidarity with the families of those who have been killed while they tried to overcome addictions,” the municipal government said in a statement, adding that it will help to pay for the funeral expenses of those killed.

Experts were gathering evidence and interviewing witnesses to establish “the reasons for the tragic incident,” the Guanajuato state prosecutor’s office said.

Mexican media outlets reported that the victims of the fire had been locked up inside the rehab center.

Mexico’s privately run drug rehabilitation centers are often abusive, clandestine, unregulated and underfunded. They have been the targets of similar attacks in the past.

The industrial and agricultural state of Guanajuato has for years been the scene of a bloody turf battle between the Jalisco New Generation cartel and a local gang, the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel. Guanajuato has the highest number of homicides of any state in Mexico.

Just last month, investigators found 17 bodies during a search for missing persons in an abandoned house in Guanajuato. Days before that, seven people, including children, were gunned down in the same region.

Mexican drug gangs have killed suspected street-level dealers from rival gangs sheltering at rehab facilities in the past. Officials also believe cartels sometimes execute patients who refuse to join their ranks.

In April, gunmen shot up a drug rehab clinic in the troubled Sinaloa state, killing at least nine people.

In July 2022, six people were shot dead at a drug rehab center near the western Mexican city of Guadalajara. Two years before that, heavily armed men stormed a drug rehab center in the central city of Irapuato and killed 27 people.

In 2010, 19 people were killed in an attack on a rehab center in Chihuahua, a city in northern Mexico. More than a dozen other attacks on such facilities occurred in the decade between those massacres.

Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.