MEXICO CITY, April 17 (Reuters) - Gunmen snatched a Mexican crime reporter outside a police station near the U.S. border, the latest journalist victim of a deadly drug war in which traffickers are stepping up attacks on the media.
Four armed men dragged Saul Martinez from his car in the city of Agua Prieta early on Monday morning as he sought refuge in a police station, said his brother Edgar Martinez, editor of the bi-weekly Interdiario newspaper where he worked.
Martinez told Reuters his brother had been investigating another abduction in Agua Prieta, a strategic point for illegal narcotics being shipped to the United States, and had feared he was being followed for more than a week.
"We are 95 percent sure he is dead," he said in a telephone interview.
Mexican journalists reporting on drug gangs are often targeted by traffickers, but attacks on the media appear to be mounting as President Felipe Calderon cracks down on a bloody war between cartels that has killed over 600 people this year.
Gunmen shot dead a reporter from Mexican television network Televisa earlier this month in the Pacific resort of Acapulco, which has become a major battleground for rival gangs.
Agua Prieta, in Mexico's Sonora state, lies across the border from Douglas, Arizona and is home to assembly-for-export factories known as maquiladoras.
It is also an entry point for cocaine and a battleground for rival cartels in a war that killed 2,000 people last year and is continues to rage despite Calderon's crackdown.
Agua Prieta's police chief was shot dead in a daylight ambush in February, and Martinez said he was killed in exactly the same spot where his brother was abducted.
Calderon has made some headway in capturing cartel chiefs.
Mexican police said on Tuesday they had arrested the local head of the notorious Gulf Cartel drug gang in Reynosa, another border city just south of McAllen, Texas.
Juan Oscar Garza was the cartel's leader in the city and was sought in Mexico for smuggling drugs, guns and people across the border, the attorney-general's office said.
The Gulf Cartel is one of the country's two most powerful trafficking gangs and is locked in a bitter fight with rival smugglers from the Pacific coast. Its leader Osiel Cardenas was extradited to the United States in January.
Condemning Martinez's abduction, Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said the government's crackdown, which has sent thousands of troops across the country to pursue traffickers, was also putting journalists more directly in danger.
"An anti-drug offensive by the federal authorities is triggering violent reprisals from the traffickers," it said in a statement. "Journalists are more exposed than ever to this kind of violence and we fear a sharp decline in press freedom in certain states."
(Additional reporting by Gunther Hamm)
