Police found the tank during a raid on a remote ranch in Jalisco, western Mexico.
The armour plated vehicle, dubbed "Monster Zeta" has a revolving gun turret and welded metal sheeting designed to withstand explosions.
Drug violence has been increasing across Mexico since President Felipe Calderon deployed the army to fight the cartels in December 2006.
The Jalisco region had been spared the worst of the mass killings and beheadings, but drug-related murders more than doubled last year to 600.
Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom says authorities have caught the suspected local leader of a group of drug gang hitmen accused of killing and beheading nearly 30 field workers on a ranch near Mexico's border.
Mr. Colom told reporters Tuesday that the person in custody appears to have been responsible for directing the group that killed the workers. Authorities have identified the suspect as Elder Estuardo Morales Pineda.
The massacre took place in Guatemala's Peten province earlier this month. Officials have blamed Mexico's Zetas drug gang for the incident, which has been described as one of Guatemala's worst mass killings in a generation. Police have said most of the victims were beheaded.
In response to the massacre, Mr. Colom last week declared a "state of siege" in the Peten region. The move, which suspends constitutional guarantees, was put into effect to give authorities time to track down the killers.
Authorities have said that of the various Mexican drug gangs operating in Guatemala, the Zetas seem to have made the most inroads. In Mexico, the Zetas have been hit hard by the military and federal police since President Felipe Calderon took office in late 2006 and began a crackdown on organized crime groups.
In another development, Guatemalan authorities say officials have found the chopped up body of a local prosecutor - a killing also blamed on the Zetas.
Last year, a U.S. State Department report said entire regions of Guatemala are now essentially under the control of the Zetas.
The Zetas began as a Mexican military unit that defected and began working with the Gulf cartel. The Zetas split from the cartel last year and the two groups are now fierce rivals.
The dismembered and ravaged body of a prosecuting attorney was found in northern Guatemala on May 24, just one day after he had been abducted. The victim, Allan Stowlinsky Vidaurre, is presumed to have been murdered by Los Zetas - a Mexican criminal organization that has become increasingly powerful and violent as it seeks further control of the narcotics trade in Guatemala. The same narcoterrorist organization has been blamed for the mass murder of 27 persons on May 14 in a region of Guatemala bordering Mexico.
According to official sources, "the murdered individual is Assistant Prosecutor Allan Stowlinsky Vidaurre who was abducted yesterday (May 23). He partcipated in the investigations into capturing the presumed leader of the Zetas, Hugo Gomez - a.k.a. El Comandante Bruja (Commander Witch)."
The crime occured in Coban, the capital city of the province of Alta Verapaz, north of the national capital, Guatemala City. According to official sources, the murderers left pieces of the dismembered body in plastic bags labeled with a message and signed 'Z200,' This is a short-hand for Hugo Gomez, who leads the cell of the Zetas now raging in the Central American republic. Some of the plastic bags containing the remains of the prosecutor were found next to the main offices of the provincial government, while others were found at a local public market. Stowlinsky Vidaurre was abducted on the evening of May 23 when he went to a sports center in Coban to collect his son from a soccer match.
Yesterday, shortly after 19:00 pm Police were called to the Lomas de Morelos, Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, right on Diamond Street, they found the remains of a man who had been dismembered.
Locals were responsible for alerting the authorities of the terrible discovery, as the head and the man's arm had been placed on the hood of a truck Explorer with Texas license plates.
Inside the vehicle were still other parts of the dismembered, so we requested the assistance of the Forensic Medical Service personnel, who were responsible for lifting the wreckage.
In the final minutes of yesterday, elements of the Durango Municipal Police received the report of several bodies outside the Plaza de Toros, so they moved to the place and found nine people executed, and confirmed by the Ministry of Public Security State.
The Plaza de Toros Alejandra had been used by gunmen in the past, this time left nine bodies, so the Medical Examiner conducted a survey of them and took them to their facilities, where they remain unidentified.
The Mexican Army and State Police guarded the area while performing the first inquiries.
The Interior Ministry fired seven top officials in charge of immigration matters in regions where the abduction of undocumented migrants by organized gangs has been rampant and local officials increasingly are being implicated as complicit in the crimes.
The ministry said in a May 12 statement that National Immigration Institute employees in seven states with a large northward flow of undocumented migrants would be subjected to additional screening and oversight.
The move follows revelations from judicial and human rights officials that immigration officers allegedly hand over migrants to criminal groups, who then demand ransoms from the victims’ relatives.
Catholics working with undocumented migrants welcomed the decision but also expressed skepticism with the timing.
“We’ve been telling them about this for a long time,” Father Jose Alejandro Solalinde, director of the Brothers of the Road migrant shelter in Oaxaca state, told Radio Formula.
“They accept it when it’s evident, when they can no longer hide it,” he said.
Alberto Xicotencatl, director of Belen Inn of the Migrants shelter in the northern city of Saltillo, questioned if the move was a true attempt to purge a corrupted immigration department or an attempt by the Mexican government to appear to be pro-active in advance of a summer visit by inspectors from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
“The timing appears coincidental,” Xicotencatl said.
Advocates for migrants have complained about the work of state-level immigration directors, who Xicotencatl said often rule by fiat instead of adhering to the law.
“The attitude by directors toward human rights often leaves something to be desired,” he said.
The mistreatment of undocumented migrants transiting the country has been common in Mexico for more than a decade, but worsened in recent years as criminal groups such as Los Zetas have moved in on the human trafficking business.
Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission reported that 11,333 migrants were kidnapped over a six-month period in 2010 and alleged the public officials were often complicit.
The commission announced May 12 that it will investigate the seven fired state directors for alleged links to Los Zetas, Mexican media reported.
The attorney general’s office confirmed the arraignment of six immigration officers in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, who kidnapped migrants allege were complicit in their abductions.
Meanwhile, threats against Catholic-run migrant shelters have continued, Xicotencatl said. The most recent case occurred in Piedras Negras, which borders Eagle Pass, Texas, where gunmen arrived May 9 at the Dignified Border shelter and ordered the facility to close.
A shelter employee was forced into an SUV at gunpoint, had his head covered with a sack and was threatened, according to a bulletin released by Amnesty International.
Attempts to reach the shelter and a spokesman for the Diocese of Piedras Negras were unsuccessful.
The 56-year-old was targeted at a house in Hazelbrook Avenue, Bangor, Co Down, shortly after midday on Friday.
Police believe the gun attack could be linked to the drugs trade.
Another man was taken to hospital with wounds which are not life-threatening.
A man was later arrested in Ormeau Avenue, Belfast, by officers investigating the killing.
Eyewitnesses said several police cars surrounded the suspect's vehicle and the man was immediately put into a forensic boiler suit.
Police said no members of the security forces were involved.
Detectives from PSNI Serious Crime Branch investigating Mr Morrison's murder later appealed for information on several vehicles.
They want to hear from anyone who saw a car on fire around Somme Heritage Centre in Newtownards between 9am and 1pm to come forward and who saw a silver vehicle entering or leaving the car park at this time,
Elsewhere they are appealing for anyone in the Clandeboye Road or Hazelbrook Avenue areas of Bangor who may have seen a silver Honda Civic car, reg SKZ 2442, with three people on board to contact them
The sisters visit on birthdays too, and Mother's Day, to lay flowers. Their parents, Terence and Christine Hodson, are buried together at Springvale with no gaudy headstones, just a simple plaque bearing their names.
Their father was inextricably tied to Melbourne's secret nexus between bad crooks and bad cops; he was a drug dealer turned police informer who was about to go one step further by blowing the lid off police corruption in the drug underworld.
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The Hodsons were the 27th and 28th victims of Melbourne's notorious gangland war although, in many ways, the most significant because the aftershocks continue to rock the state government, underworld and Victoria Police.
The saga of incomplete efforts to solve the killings plays a part in the current crisis within the force's senior command and also in the bitter split between police Chief Commissioner Simon Overland and former deputy Sir Ken Jones. Last Friday Welsh-born Jones was forced on early leave, after already giving notice of his resignation. Overland has refused to explain why he pushed him out the door.
The rift follows a series of scandals that have enveloped Victoria Police during Overland's leadership including the release of incomplete crime statistics before the last state election and database failings allowing alleged murderers to be undetected during their time breaching parole.
But also fuelling divisions among senior police is the death of Carl Williams in prison. Police had attempted to persuade him to turn informer on corrupt police. Although there is no allegation that this was a factor in Williams's death, senior government, departmental and policing officials, including Jones, are believed to have asked why more care was not taken to protect Williams in jail.
This week, Overland backed the role of departmental secretary Penny Armytage in sanctioning Williams's transfer from isolation at Barwon Prison.
But confirmation of all this is hard to establish: neither Jones nor Overland will speak to the media about it. What is certain is that despite multiple inquiries - including several under Overland's watch - those responsible for murdering the Hodsons in their Kew home have not been brought to justice. Efforts by police to get witnesses connected to the killings to testify have also come spectacularly unstuck.
''Just when someone comes up with something,'' says Nikki Hodson, ''it falls apart again.''
Her sister Mandy Hodson found her parents' bodies seven years ago with their hands tied behind their backs, two gunshots in the back of each head. She says her father's lucky number was seven. He got that from his own father, a bookmaker. But she says there's been no luck for the family and also none for justice in Victoria in the seven years that have passed.
''This crime is the key that unlocks the door to corruption. It will open up a Pandora's box that no one wants unlocked. They want that box to stay locked and they want to throw away the key.''
ON GRAND final day in 2003 Terry Hodson was involved in a crime he and his partners must have thought was a sure-fire windfall, a goldmine.
There was a house in Oakleigh being used by criminals to store drugs - $1 million in ecstasy pills. The house was about to be raided by police. The plan was to get in first and steal then sell the drugs. Hodson and corrupt (and now jailed) police detective David Miechel - who at one point was Mandy Hodson's lover and who knew all about the house and the impending raid - turned up armed, with empty bags, a screwdriver, dog-repellent and torches.
But old-fashioned justice intervened. A neighbour heard noises and called the local police. Miechel and Hodson were easily caught. Miechel was mauled by Silky the police dog. Hodson was found hiding behind a tree in a nearby primary school.
What happened next changed the game. Hodson was already a police informer but became a police corruption informer, telling police not about crooks but about bent cops such as Miechel. He alleged Miechel's partner in the drug squad, Paul Dale, was the third member of the burglary team, masterminding it from afar.
All three were charged in December of 2003. By then, police documents on Hodson had disappeared from St Kilda Road police headquarters. Hodson and his wife were killed - silenced - in May 2004, and Dale's charges dropped. The intervening period has been marked by several key events, including the death of Williams in prison last year. And since 2003 there have been eight inquiries or taskforces into the murders or their prequels or sequels, including Williams's death. Some are focused on who killed who. Others are looking at system failures.
Eight inquiries in eight years. Yet the Hodson killings are still unsolved.
In his jobs as assistant commissioner for crime, deputy commissioner and now chief commissioner, Simon Overland has been intimately involved with several of these inquiries, including during the lengthy period he was overseeing the Purana Taskforce. Purana's success fighting the gangland wars is one of Overland's key achievements. Observers say he has also been important in modernising the state's police force.
Ironically it was the notorious gangland war which elevated Overland through the ranks. Now
it threatens to be his undoing.
Two people were charged with the Hodson murders - a career hitman aligned to the Carl Williams cabal, and Dale, who now runs a petrol station in country Victoria. Both sets of charges were later dropped. It was second time lucky in that respect for Dale, who continues to maintain his innocence.
So why the multiple inquiries? Could investigations have been done better?
The most recent police inquiry into the Hodson deaths is Taskforce Driver, established in 2010. Until recently, it was headed by Jones. It has used the classic cold-case methodology - going over an unsolved crime's evidence, re-examining files. Jones told the ABC when Driver was set up last year that its key virtue was ''independence''. He said he did not ''come into this with any baggage''.
Driver took over the work of Taskforce Petra, which was specifically investigating the Hodson deaths and whether Dale had anything to do with it.
There is a debate inside Victoria Police about how well Petra - which was staffed by experienced investigators - was managed. Petra made big breakthroughs and solved significant underworld crimes, including murders dating back decades but despite that, some police believe elements of the taskforce were mismanaged.
A court heard this year that a copy of a sensitive police document created by Petra was given to Carl Williams while he was in prison. Senior police sources have said that Williams should only have been shown the document, not given a copy.
Petra was also managing Nicola Gobbo, the former gangland defence lawyer who was set to become a witness against Paul Dale. Gobbo wore a recording device during a conversation she had with Dale in 2008. But the tapes have never been played in open court.
In a Supreme Court writ lodged last year, she said being a key witness in the case caused her to fear for her life and worsened health problems. She alleged Petra breached their agreement and had not provided appropriate support, but has since settled. Managing a witness can be difficult. But some senior police still wonder whether Gobbo could have been better handled.
Victoria Police deny Petra was mismanaged. A spokeswoman told The Saturday Age: ''We absolutely dispute allegations of a failure of the investigation or governance [of Petra]. We believe Petra had the appropriate governance structures in place.''
Yet it is a fact that, at least in some areas, the new Taskforce Driver is doing what the old Taskforce Petra had already done.
This pattern - investigating what has already been investigated - can be traced right back to the very first Ethical Standards Department inquiry after Hodson was arrested at the drug house in Oakleigh. Despite it clearly being a case that could yield so much about the underworld, the drug trade and police corruption, only two ESD detectives were assigned to it. Calls for a taskforce were denied by senior police.
The next inquiry - focusing on the Hodson murders but picking over what ESD had already found - was most vexed. It was led by veteran homicide detective Charlie Bezzina, who has now left the force, edged out, he claims, by Simon Overland. He writes in his book The Job that the Hodson case ''started a chain of events that made me question the judgment and values of a number of people in authority''.
