A group of armed men blew up an ambulance Friday, apparently with a grenade, to kill a rival who was being transferred from one hospital to another.

The attackers, travelling in two vans, blocked passage and forced two paramedics and a driver accompanying the injurered on the ambulance to leave the vehicle and get away from it before opening the rear doors and opening fire on both the patient and his young wife who was accompanying him in the transfer.

The paramedics and the driver who had been travelling said that as they ran away they heard shots and then saw the ambulance catch fire. Investigators think that the unidentified attackers used a fragmentation grenade before driving away.

Gunmen tossed a grenade at an ambulance and then opened its doors to kill a patient inside who had narrowly survived an earlier shooting in a drug cartel-plagued Mexican state Friday. Paramedics ran for their lives during the attack.

Vehicles carrying four masked gunmen cut off the ambulance around 2 a.m. as it carried the 23-year-old man to a hospital in Morelia, the capital on Michoacan state, according to a report from the state prosecutor’s office.

Assailants tossed a fragmentation grenade at the ambulance, setting it on fire, and the two paramedics ran away, according to the police report. The gunmen then opened the back doors and fired at the patient and his wife, who was accompanying him.

The man died and the 20-year-old woman was listed in serious condition. No arrests have been made.
-AP

Uruapan, has been hard hit by drug violence since 2006. Recently the drug war has intensified in Uruapan as the rival paramilitary cartel enforcers Los Zetas war against the vigilante turned cartel La Familia Michoacana for control of the western state.