CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – A group of armed men ambushed and killed a policeman and his 13-year-old daughter in Ciudad Camargo, in the northern border state of Chihuahua, officials with the state prosecutor’s office announced on Sunday.

The victims were identified as municipal police officer Gilberto Guzman Ramirez and his daughter Zulema Guzman.

The murders occurred Saturday afternoon when the officer was driving with the girl in a squad car west of Camargo.

Guzman Ramirez had been in the highway police corps for more than 10 years and recently had been acting as a bodyguard for the police director, Alejandro Perez, with whom he had been just minutes before being murdered.

This is the second case in recent days in which minors have been killed by assassins gunning for others in Chihuahua. Last Friday, 7-year-old Raul Jasiel Ramirez was killed along with his father in Ciudad Juarez.

According to eyewitnesses, several individuals shot Guzman Ramirez and then shot his daughter when she tried to flee the murder scene.

Chihuahua, which borders on the United States, is Mexico’s most violent state, in particular due to the ongoing settling of scores between different drug cartels seeking to control the lucrative drug trade in Ciudad Juarez, which lies across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, and which is a conduit for drugs heading north and weapons and cash heading south.

In other violence in Mexico over the weekend, on Saturday the body of a soldier was found in the city of Gomez Palacio, in the northern state of Durango. The victim was identified as Ramiro Luna.

Durango is also one of the areas where the drug cartels are most active and where last Thursday 11 young people were wounded in a bar shooting in Gomez Palacio.

Several months ago, different sources – including Catholic Church officials – started saying that drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the head of the Sinaloa cartel, was living in Durango. The cartel is fighting in several states against the Juarez, Gulf and Beltran Leyva cartels.

The violence attributed to organized crime has taken more than 6,000 lives so far this year in Mexico and 15,000 over the last three years, during which time President Felipe Calderon has been mounting an offensive against the cartels using 45,000 soldiers and 20,000 federal officers.