Mexican police (stock)
Mexican police (stock)iStock

Two Israelis who were shot dead in Mexico City this week were involved in money laundering and had links to local mafias, Mexico's government said on Friday, according to AFP.

Alon Azulay, 41, and Benjamin Yeshurun Sutchi, 44, were gunned down in a restaurant inside a mall in the south of the sprawling capital city on Thursday.

Israel's embassy in Mexico said both had "criminal records in Israel as well as Mexico."

"These are a settling of scores between organized criminal gangs with various interests," Alfonso Durazo, Mexico’s secretary of security and civilian protection, said on Friday.

The criminal gangs involved were in disputes for a variety of reasons but it was "mainly about money laundering", he added.

Both Israeli and Mexican criminal organizations were involved in the affair, according to Dorazo.

A Mexican woman, believed to be one of two killers, was arrested trying to leave the scene and has been questioned by police.

She originally claimed she'd attacked one of the two men, with whom she had been in a relationship, because he'd been unfaithful.

However, the police were skeptical of her story and she later admitted to the police that she was paid 5,000 pesos (about 1,000 shekels) for the murders.

Mexican media outlets have published footage of the incident which showed a second assassin - a male - hiding his gun in a napkin prior to shooting the two men. The second assassin has not yet been apprehended.

(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)