A man who was kicked out of a bar in Mexico returned and set it ablaze, killing 11 people and injuring six others over the weekend, police said.
Authorities arrested a suspect Saturday afternoon in the attack at Beer House in San Luis Rio Colorado, less than 300 feet from the U.S. border. He has not been publicly identified.
The attacker visited the bar early Saturday morning and within an hour became very drunk, according to the local prosecutor’s office in the state of Sonora. He was removed from the establishment for harassing women, investigators said.
The suspect got in his pickup truck, backed up to the front of the bar and began pouring gasoline on the door, state attorney general Gustavo Romulo Salas Chavez told reporters.
“He then used some instrument, perhaps a blowtorch, he used it as an igniting agent,” Salas Chavez said in Spanish. “That’s when the fire began.”
Seven men and four women were killed in the fire. Ten of the 11 victims were adults, and the 11th was 17 years old, according to police. At least one of the victims was a U.S. citizen.
The six injured people were taken to hospitals on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, the Washington Post reported.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security told the paper it was “looking into” the arson attack. Mexican authorities did not suggest the suspected killer had any ties to drug cartels.
San Luis Rio Colorado is a border city of about 200,000 people. It shares a metropolitan area with San Luis, Ariz., which sits in the far southwestern corner of the state, about 15 miles south of Yuma.