Mexico City's police chief escapes alive after brazen ambush by 28 cartel hitmen reportedly armed with sniper rifles and grenades

• Mexico City's police chief, Omar García Harfuch, was injured in an ambush by heavily armed suspected drugs cartel hitmen on Friday morning.
• The ambush took place at dawn in an upscale neighborhood in the Mexican capital, with two bodyguards and a female passerby killed in the attack.
• Harfuch suffered three gunshot wounds but survived, and in a hospital bed tweet blamed the Jalisco New Generation cartel for the assassination bid.
• The brazen attack comes amid spiraling violence in Mexico's drug wars.

Mexico City's police chief Omar García Harfuch was shot several times after his vehicle was ambushed early Friday in an assassination attempt by suspected drug cartel members.

An armored SUV carrying Harfuch to work was attacked in an upscale neighborhood in the Mexican capital at around dawn, according to the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Two of his bodyguards and a female passerby were killed in the attack.

Around 28 assailants took part in the assassination attempt, armed with snipers rifles and grenades, reported the BBC.

Security camera footage broadcast on Mexican TV showed heavily armed men in an open-backed truck disguised as a work vehicle and an SUV blocking off a road to open fire on Garcia's automobile on the tree-lined avenue, the Thomson Reuters Foundation reported.

Harfuch sustained three injuries, and tweeted out shortly from his hospital bed accusing the Jalisco New Generation Cartel of the attempt on his life.

"Our nation must continue to confront the cowardly organized crime," he wrote.

Garcia was wounded in the shoulder, collarbone, and the knee, Security Minister Alfonso Durazo told a news conference.

The Jalisco cartel's leader is a former police officer, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as "El Mencho." The US Drug Enforcement Agency has a $10 million bounty for information leading to his arrest.

The brazen attack comes only weeks after federal judge, Uriel Villegas Ortiz, and his wife, Verónica Barajas, were assassinated in Colima, a state on the Pacific coast plagued by cartel violence, reported the Associated Press.

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador took office in 2018 on a pledge to reduce the drug violence that has swept Mexico in recent years.

But last year the number of homicides hit a record high, reported the Thomson Reuters Foundation, and this year is on track to be even higher.