Suspected drug hitmen burst into a party and killed 13 high school students, in Ciudad Juarez on January 31, the latest massacre in one of the world's deadliest cities, the Mexican army said.
Gunmen jumped out of sport utility vehicles and fired at the students, who were celebrating victory in a local American football championship, in a house in the city across the border from El Paso, Texas, in the early hours of Sunday.
Pools of blood collected in the street outside the house, the Reuters reported. Shocked relatives and neighbors gathered on the street outside the crime scene.
Army spokesman Enrique Torres said the victims were between 15 and 20 years old, and an additional 17 party-goers were wounded in the shooting, some critically.
Ciudad Juarez is known as the bloodiest city in Mexico's drug war as rival cartels fight over markets and control of smuggling routes into the United States.
Violence is escalating even as federal police and soldiers patrol the streets. Some 2,650 people were killed in drug violence in Ciudad Juarez last year and cartel murders have jumped since the beginning of 2010.