Twelve cops jailed as Mexico figures out shooting of U.S. Embassy workers

Confusion still reigns over Friday's shooting of a U.S. embassy vehicle in Mexico, and while authorities figure out what happened, they're keeping the 12 Mexican federal police officers involved in custody. Whatever the final account turns out to be, the police involved come off looking pretty bad in The Associated Press' account, after they apparently shot and injured two U.S. embassy workers. They're charged with attempted murder, according to CNN, and abusing their authority, reports The AP's Michael Weissenstein. "That leaves open the possibility of both a deliberate attack on the Americans by corrupt officers and a gross error by well-intentioned but trigger-happy police operating in a dangerous area."

The accounts of how police came to fire more than a dozen bullets into the armored U.S. embassy vehicle with diplomatic plates are still vague. Two U.S. embassy employees and a Mexican Navy captain were traveling in the Toyota Landcruiser near Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City, when they came under attack by gunmen who included federal police. Weissenstein reports that "the Mexican government said federal police were conducting unspecified law-enforcement activities in the rural, mountainous area known for criminal activity when they came upon the car, which attempted to flee and came under fire from gunmen in four vehicles including federal police." As The New York Times' Randal C. Archibold notes, "Mexican newspapers have reported that all of the shots fired came from the police."

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.