(Adds details, quote) By Ignacio Alvarado CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico, May 10 (Reuters) - Suspected drug gunmen ambushed and killed a Mexican police chief on Saturday in a murder campaign against senior policemen that has escalated in the past week. Juan Antonio Roman, the No. 2 policeman in the gritty border city of Ciudad Juarez, was riddled with bullets outside his home as he stepped from his pickup truck in the early hours of the morning, a police spokesman said. He was the sixth senior policeman killed throughout the country this week in a blow to President Felipe Calderon's fight against well-armed cartels that smuggle cocaine, marijuana and amphetamines to the United States. "He came home for a reunion with family and friends and arrived in his official vehicle, but the hired assassins were waiting for him," police spokesman Jaime Torres said. Local media said the gunmen fired some 50 bullets at Roman. Roman's name had been on top of a death list that drug traffickers left at a Ciudad Juarez police monument in January. Hired gunmen believed to be in the pay of the Sinaloa cartel killed Edgar Millan, one of the country's top federal policemen, at his home on Thursday. Some 1,100 people have died so far this year as the drug gangs battle each other and security forces. Calderon has deployed 25,000 troops and federal police to fight the gangs. Calderon, a conservative, said on Friday that Mexicans had to take back their streets from drug peddlers and gunmen. "We have to come together to confront this evil, we Mexicans have to definitively and categorically say, 'That's enough!'," Calderon said. Dozens of hit men from a rival cartel killed a son of Mexico's most wanted man, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, who heads the Sinaloa cartel based in northwestern Mexico. A spokeswoman for the attorney general's office confirmed that one of three people killed in the Sinaloa state capital was Edgar Guzman, the son of the drug lord. Around 40 people opened fire on Guzman as he stepped out of an armored pickup truck outside a shopping center in Culiacan on Thursday night, El Universal newspaper said. Investigators recovered 500 bullet shell casings. Sinaloa chief "Shorty" Guzman escaped from a high-security prison in a laundry van in 2001 and is locked in turf wars with other Mexican cartels. (Additional reporting by Chris Aspin) (Editing by Xavier Briand)
ATTENTION EDITORS - VISUALS COVERAGE OF SCENES OF DEATH AND INJURY The slain bodies of three of seven men found dead with signs of torture are seen at a corn field ...
