CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - Three people connected to the US consulate in Mexico's most violent border city were murdered, police said on Sunday, prompting US President Barack Obama to respond with outrage and sadness. Gunmen on Saturday killed an American couple associated with the consulate in Ciudad Juarez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, in broad daylight, a police source told Reuters. The couple's baby survived the attack, the source said. Minutes later, another man with ties to the consulate was murdered in a different area of the city at the center of a bloody turf war between drug cartels, according to the source. Gunmen boxed in the third victim's car with other vehicles and shot him, according to a media witness who saw the crime scene in the city where 8,000 troops and federal police have been deployed. A consulate employee and her husband, both U.S. citizens, along with the husband of another employee who is a Mexican citizen, were murdered, the White House said in a statement. "The president is deeply saddened and outraged by the news," White House National Security Council spokesman Mike Hammer said in a statement, adding that Obama "shares in the outrage of the Mexican people at the murders of thousands in Ciudad Juarez and elsewhere in Mexico." In an apparent reaction to the attacks, the U.S. State Department on Sunday updated its warning on travel in Mexico to say that it had authorised the departure of dependents of US government personnel from US consulates in several northern Mexico border cities. In Ciudad Juarez, one of the world's deadliest cities, there are as many as a dozen drug murders a day and scenes of bullet-riddled vehicles and bodies lying in pools of blood are common. Mexico's drug war has killed some 18,600 people, mainly cartel members and police officers, since President Felipe Calderon took power and launched an army crackdown on traffickers in late 2006. The rampant violence worries Washington and foreign investors.
