Canadian Couple Shot And Wounded In Robbery Attempt At Mexican Resort Town
Posted January 20, 2010 8:15 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A Canadian couple has been shot and wounded in a robbery attempt at a Mexican Pacific resort town, police said Wednesday.
The man and woman were bicycling outside the hotel zone of Ixtapa, a resort-studded city north of Acapulco, Tuesday when armed men tried to rob them, said Guerrero state police spokesman Carlos Gomez. He said the pair resisted, and the gunmen opened fire.
Gomez said the 50-year-old man was shot in the abdomen, while a bullet grazed the 45-year-old woman’s ear. Both were hospitalized.
Gomez said the couple had arrived a few days earlier and were staying at a hotel. He did not know their hometowns.
An official at Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs had no immediate information on the attack.
It’s the latest in a string of violent incidents involving Canadians in Mexico in recent years.
A Vancouver man was fatally shot in the head after he opened the door of his room at a hotel in Cabo San Lucas in May 2008. His girlfriend was also shot and injured.
A couple from Woodbridge, Ont., were found with their throats slit in February 2006 at a resort near Playa del Carmen, Mexico. No arrests were ever made.
Another Woodbridge man, Adam DePrisco, 19, was killed outside an Acapulco nightclub in January 2007. Family and friends believed he was beaten to death, though a Mexican doctor blamed the death on a hit-and-run driver.
In May, 2007, Jeff Toews of Grande Prairie, Alta, died from injuries after he visited a nightclub in Cancun. Mexican authorities concluded he fell from the second floor of his hotel, but at the time, Toews’ family said his head and back injuries came from a severe beating.
Ixtapa, a town of resort hotels popular with tourists and Hollywood’s elite, and its sister city of Zihuatanejo have struggled with crime recently, much of it tied to drug gangs.
