CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – Seven men were gunned down in separate incidents in Ciudad Juarez, located just across the border from El Paso, Texas, including four killed at a motel, one of whom was a former U.S. soldier, Mexican prosecutors said Monday.

A man was murdered Sunday afternoon in Nogales, a neighborhood in the border city’s northern section, following a chase that left another man wounded.

In Salvarcar, located in Juarez’s southeastern section, a man was gunned down, while another man was wounded in the incident on a street.

A man was killed and five other people wounded in Melchor Ocampo, a neighborhood in the western section of Ciudad Juarez, when gunmen burst into a house where a private party was going on and opened fire.

The wounded were taken to a public hospital in Juarez, which lived through the bloodiest month in its history in August, with more than 300 people murdered in drug-related violence.

The worst incident occurred around midnight Sunday at the Campo Real Motel in the city’s east end, where four people were massacred, including Eduardo Guillen, a retired U.S. soldier who lived in El Paso, where he worked for the post office, a spokesman for the local prosecutor’s office said.

When he served in the U.S. military, Guillen had been stationed at Fort Bliss, Texas, authorities said.

The victims were drinking when the gunmen attacked, hitting the group with at least 70 rounds, officials said.

So far this year, Juarez, considered Mexico’s most dangerous city and the scene of frequent shootouts between rival drug traffickers, has registered nearly 1,500 murders, accounting for some 30 percent of the nearly 5,000 killings reported between January and August across Mexico.

The murder rate took off in the border city of 1.5 million people in 2007, when more than 800 people were killed, then it more than doubled to 1,623 in 2008.

Mexican officials, who deployed 8,000 federal police and soldiers in the border metropolis months ago in an effort to reduce the violence, dealt some blows to organized crime groups in August, such as the arrests last month of four suspects in connection with 211 murders.

Federal police in Michoacan state, meanwhile, arrested four gunmen over the weekend who worked for the La Familia Michoacana criminal organization, the Public Safety Secretariat said.

The gunmen were arrested following a shootout in Morelia, the capital of Michoacan, the secretariat said, adding that two of the gunmen were wounded in the clash.

La Familia, which is based in the western state, is considered one of the government’s main targets at this time, with security forces stepping up their operations against the criminal organization since the discovery on July 13 of the bodies of 12 federal police officers.

The killings were apparently a reprisal for the arrest on July 11 of a leading La Familia figure, Arnoldo Rueda Medina.

Officials in the southeastern state of Tabasco said they captured three of the four suspects in the killing over the weekend of state legislative candidate Jose Francisco Fuentes Esperon, his wife and two children.

Fuentes Esperon, a former university president and member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, was killed on Saturday, a day after launching his campaign.

A 16-year-old neighbor of the candidate and three friends allegedly committed the killings during a botched robbery attempt, Tabasco Attorney General Rafael Gonzalez Lastro said. EFE