Plane crashes in northern Mexico, killing six

Six people were killed when a small plane crashed in northern Mexico's state of Chihuahua, local officials confirmed Wednesday.

The site of the crash Tuesday night was located in Cieneguita, in the township of Urique, a community situated on the border between Chihuahua and the neighboring Sinaloa state, according to a statement issued by the state prosecutor's office.

The remains of the killed, all men, were found, among them that of the pilot, who was identified as Eleazar Ramirez Perez, 58, from Guasave of Sinaloa, said the statement.

Local residents said the ill-fated aircraft was shot down in the early hours of Tuesday. Authorities neither denied nor confirmed those reports, but they did say they had increased the number of state police officers patrolling the region to 120.

"The state prosecutor, Jorge Enrique Gonzalez Nicolas, will shortly visit several communities in the township of Urique to supervise the measures implemented and attend firsthand to the concerns of the people," said a spokesman for the state prosecutor 's office.

According to Tuesday's edition of Sinaloa-based news website Linea Directa, eyewitnesses reported the Cessna 206 aircraft was shot at by armed men belonging to a criminal ring based out of Sinaloa, a state infamous for drug trafficking.

The downing of the plane followed of a series of recent clashes between rival organized crime rings, and between criminals and law enforcement, in different parts of Mexico, including the west- central state of Jalisco, where cartel members shot down a military helicopter last week with a rocket-propelled grenade in an unusually brazen show of strength.

In March, unknown assailants in the area killed two survey takers working for Mexico's National Institute of Statistics and Geography. Enditem