Five police officers died Monday after they were ambushed by an armed group in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, on the border with Guatemala, local officials said.

The attack happened in the town of Frontera Comalapa, where the Chiapas state police officers were on patrol when they were ambushed by an armed group.

“Members of the state police were attacked and ambushed,” the governor of Chiapas, Eduardo Ramirez, said on X.

The local Security Secretariat said it had deployed more than 1,000 officers to “attend to the situation and guarantee security in the area.”

The agency also shared an image of the officers’ patrol vehicle completely engulfed in flames on a roadway.

In recent months, Chiapas has been shaken by a bloody turf war between the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels — the country’s two most powerful criminal organizations.

Criminal violence, most of it linked to drug trafficking, has claimed around 480,000 lives in Mexico since 2006 and left more than 120,000 people missing. (AFP)