MEXICO CITY – Two Federal Police officers under investigation for drug trafficking killed three fellow officers who were about to arrest them at Mexico City’s Benito Juarez International Airport, the Public Safety Secretariat said.

The official version of the incident confirms eyewitness accounts and information provided by airport security officials, who said police officers or other uniformed individuals killed the three officers.

The shooting occurred around 8:50 a.m. Monday in the airport’s Terminal 2, leaving two officers dead at the scene. The third officer died while being treated at a hospital.

Two Federal Police officers assigned to the airport opened fire when officers from another unit tried to arrest them, the secretariat said.

The two officers were being investigated for their alleged links “to the activities of a drug trafficking network,” the secretariat said in a statement.

“The two officers under investigation opened fire to avoid arrest when they spotted the Federal Police’s Investigations Unit, killing three federal officers,” the secretariat said.

The two Federal Police officers who gunned down their fellow officers have been identified and “operational and investigative units are focusing on their capture,” the Public Safety Secretariat said.

The two officers have not been identified, but security cameras in the terminal recorded the incident, officials said.

An investigation conducted over several months uncovered “a network of officials from different local and federal agencies” who work at the airport and are “presumably involved in drug trafficking in the terminal area,” the secretariat said.

The Federal Police “is carrying out a systematic operation to detect drug trafficking” in an effort to dismantle the network based at the airport, the secretariat said.

The operation has resulted in the seizure of 294 kilos of cocaine and the identification of a cocaine trafficking ring at the airport over the past 18 months, the secretariat said.

Mexico City’s Benito Juarez International Airport is the country’s largest airport, handling more than 25 million passengers annually. EFE