MEXICO CITY, SEPT 18: Nineteen men, women and children, including a one-year-old baby, died in a hail of gunfire on Thursday in what was described as a drug-related attack on a Mexican ranch near the US border, police said.Mexican television broadcast horrifying images of corpses, still dressed in pajamas and night gowns, piled up in front of the ranch.The ghastly scene outside the ranch, relayed by Mexico's Televisa channel, showed toys lying next to the paper cones used by police to mark the locations of bullet casings.Eighteen of the victims died immediately and one died in the hospital, according to police.``Among the eight children killed in the pre-dawn massacre, four were under four years old and one was 12 months old,'' Baja California's Attorney General Marco de la Fuente said.Two other people, including a 12-year-old boy, survived the attack and were in the hospital, he said.The bloodbath took place outside the city of Ensenada, 100 km south of the US-Mexico border in the Mexicanstate of Baja California.One man who died in the slaughter, Fermin Castro, was to be charged with growing marijuana for the Arellano Felix brothers who head the Tijuana drug cartel, De la Fuente said. He had originally said Castro survived the attack.De la Fuente said Castro was a rural schoolteacher whose family raised cattle at their ranch in the Vista al Mar community outside Ensenada.The murders occurred around 4 am (11 am GMT) when assassins drove up to the ranch in a pick-up truck and hauled the family out of their house. The gunmen then lined them up against a rock wall and shot them, said De la Fuente.Because of its proximity to the United States, Baja California is a center of the Mexican drug trade which is controlled by the Arellano Felix brothers. Tijuana, on the US-Mexican border, is one of Mexico's most violent cities with 240 murders thus far this year.Separately, ``an important US drug dealer'' identified as Randy Spradling, alias Jeffrey Peterson, was arrested in Guadalajara,said Mexico's attorney general Thursday.The arrest was made Wednesday at the request of Interpol, in connection with a shipment of two tonnes of cocaine to the US state of California, the attorney general said.
