MEXICO CITY (AP) — Vigilantes who have taken up arms against drug cartel violence and common crime in southern Mexico announced Thursday they will bring charges ranging from organized crime to kidnapping and extortion against 50 men and three women who they have been holding prisoner at improvised jails.

Villagers armed with hunting rifles, old pistols and small-bore shotguns set up armed patrols and roadblocks in the township ofAyutla almost one month ago to defend their communities against crime, saying authorities have failed to bring peace and safety to the Pacific coast state of Guerrero. So far, the state government has tolerated but not formally recognized the self-defense squads.

The growing movement toward self-policing, which has since spread to other towns in Guerrero, has sparked concern among human rights officials who say residents shouldn't be allowed to take the law into their own hands.

"What is happening in Guerrero state is a warning sign that should alert authorities to do their duty and guarantee public safety, to avoid having these (vigilante) activities grow and outstrip the power of official institutions," said the head of the National Human Rights Commission, Raul Plascencia. But in townships like Ayutla, it is clear the vigilante movement already has authorities cowed.

Villagers in squads of about a dozen patrol roads and search passing motorists, checking their identification against handwritten lists of "bad guys."

On Thursday, the unbound, unsmiling detainees were marched between rows of armed, masked vigilantes in the town square of El Meson, in the township of Ayutla. While the detainees appeared to be clean and adequately fed, and bore no obvious signs of mistreatment, reporters at the scene were not allowed to speak with them.

Two weeks before, angry villagers had turned back a team of Guerrero state human rights officials who had gone to visit the detainees and ensure they were being properly treated.

Human rights officials appear to be hamstrung; Mexican law allows rights commissions to investigate only abuses by authorities, not abuses committed by civilians against other civilians.

"We are not even sure if there are any authorities involved here," the head of the Guerrero stateHuman Rights Commission, Juan Alarcon Hernandez, said at the time.

Bruno Placido, the head of a community activist group and a leader of the vigilantes' movement, said the detainees, whom the movement refers to as "people under investigation" not prisoners, would be given a trial by an assembly of villagers.

But Placido did not say what procedures would be used or what kind of defense the detainees would be allowed to mount. "All that will be decided by the assembly," Placido said.

The trials are expected to start next week. However, the village is tightly patrolled and it remains unclear whether defense lawyers, rights officials or reporters would be allowed into the trials.

The town square of El Meson was crowded with villagers and local farmers watching the prisoner roll call Thursday; most of the detainees, who ranged from teenagers to adults, appeared to be from the same poor farmer stock as the villagers.

However, residents in Ayutla said drug gangs have been moving up from the nearby coastal resort of Acapulco, bringing cartel-style violence, kidnapping extortion with them.

Guerrero state Attorney General Martha Garzon Bernal told local media Thursday the vigilantes have no legal right to hold detainees, and said kidnapping complaints could be brought against them.

Since 1995, about 80 villages in Guerrero state have organized legally-recognized "community police" forces in which poorly armed villagers detain and prosecute people.

With their own jails, "courts" and punishments that can include forced labor for the town or re-education talks, the community police are usually recognized by state law. However, the self-defense forces in Ayutla don't belong to that system.

MEXICO CITY - Mexico's interior minister says 25 people have died in an office building explosion at the state oil company headquarters.

Miguel Angel Osorio Chong says the dead are 17 women and eight men, and another 101 were injured.

Osorio Chong spoke late Thursday to the media after the afternoon explosion, which hit the basement and first two floors of a building next to the iconic 51-story tower of Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex. He did not provide a cause for the blast.

BENGHAZI, Libya (Reuters) - As night fell over Benghazi, a familiar sound echoed across the eastern Libyan city - an explosion, and then gunfire. A bomb had just been thrown at a police car on patrol, injuring an officer.

It was the latest of many attacks on local security forces. Two months before, the man whose job it was to ensure Benghazi was safe, the police chief, was shot dead outside his home.

Two years after Libya's second city kindled the uprising that oustedMuammar Gaddafi, it epitomises a popular revolution gone awry - rival militias and Islamist gunmen more powerful than the police, moving residents to ask: where is the state?

"Imagine a city taken over by militias when all you want is to support the state," activist Mohammed Buganah said. "People feel insecure. They are very upset and annoyed about this."

There have been assaults on diplomats and international missions, including the September 11 killing of the U.S. ambassador, amid a rising tide of kidnappings, bombings and assassinations, mainly of security officials.

The anarchy, along with garbage-strewn streets and unraveling municipal services, have deepened a sense of neglect by the capital Tripoli far to the west and reawakened demands for autonomy in a region with most of Libya's oil wealth.

"Everyone is increasingly worried about eastern Libya," a diplomatic source said. "Things are seriously deteriorating."

Reinstating basic security across Libya is a priority, especially in Benghazi, cradle of the February 17 revolt against Gaddafi but now seen as a foothold and springboard for Islamist militancy once suppressed by the dictator.

Interior Minister Ashour Shuail singled out his home town as part of a mammoth project in building an effective police. "The security is getting better and the attacks are dwindling," he said in early January. "It is not as bad as it was."

But a few weeks later, a curfew is now being considered in the Mediterranean coastal city of nearly 1 million people.

NO ONE IN CHARGE

Another activist, who declined to be named for his own safety, said: "There isn't anyone fully in control of Benghazi."

Former anti-Gaddafi rebels claim to have been absorbed, at least symbolically, into the interior ministry, like the Supreme Security Committee, and military.

But fighters for such factions as the Libya Shield, February 17 and Raffalah al-Sahati boast more firepower than the police or army and are estimated to number in the thousands.

"Brigades control entrances into the city, streets, key infrastructure. The police don't want to challenge them because they just don't have the manpower," said the activist.

Ansar al-Sharia, a radical Islamist group whose members witnesses say were at the scene of the September attack on the U.S. mission, was driven out of its base by protesters after a "Rescue Benghazi" rally by outraged citizenry.

Locals say the group, which once guarded a hospital and denied involvement in the assault, has since kept a low profile.

But analysts and activists say Islamist militants are amassing power on the ground even if their numbers are unknown. The police, seen guiding traffic or carrying out patrols, admit they are often powerless, and targets of attacks.

"We only have pistols and rifles. They have tanks and heavy weapons," the chief of a downtown police station said. "We want to do our job but some police officers are simply afraid."

Even if security forces make arrests, ensuing attacks discourage prosecutions. A police investigator is still missing after being abducted in early January.

"Everyday I check under my car and in my rear view mirror before I set off," an officer who gave his name as Anis said. "I am proud to be a policeman but you have to be careful now."

The violence is mainly against security forces and may be revenge attacks by former prisoners or militants seeking to stamp their authority. But without an effective army or police, authorities have little power to confront criminal suspects.

"Benghazans need the police (to) lift our morale," one officer, also declining to be named, said. "But anyone who leaves his home for work every day is like a martyr."

SENSE OF NEGLECT, ISOLATION

This is hardly the image Benghazans want for their city. But they concede that life has been disrupted by violence and unrest on top of demands for greater autonomy or investment in a region separated from Tripoli 1,000 km (620 miles) away to the west.

Benghazi's security problems form the backdrop to more pressing civic grievances - a government failure to satisfy a public whose frustration has been simmering since rebel leaders left their eastern base for Tripoli in October 2011.

Long a pro-autonomy hotbed behind earlier attempts to unseat Gaddafi, Benghazi is now the focal point of a widespread sense that the new Tripoli authorities are still ignoring the east.

Benghazans point to rubbish-strewn streets, dirt track roads, hospitals and schools in need of basic upgrades. New shops have opened and building projects have resumed.

But they expect more.

"Where is all the money from the oil? Why are they not spending it to help us?" one female teacher said. "These politicians sit in their hotels in Tripoli and forget about us."

The bigger issue is what status Benghazi will have in the new Libya and stake in national oil supplies of 1.6 million barrels a day - much of it from the east. Discontent has led to calls for return to a federal political structure.

For about a decade after Libya became an independent state in 1951, the North African state was run along federal lines, devolving power to the eastern, western and southern regions.

Benghazi was Libya's commercial capital and the east had the cachet of being the family homeland of King Idris. Libya began to centralise its government in the last years of the monarchy. Gaddafi sped up the process after his 1969 coup, concentrating the power of the state in Tripoli and neglecting Benghazi.

"This is not new for us. Let people handle their problems," said Abubakr Buera of federalist National Union party. "We are campaigning for political decentralisation and good governance."

WESTERNERS SHUN BENGHAZI

Few Westerners live in Benghazi, which has borne the brunt of a wave of violence against diplomats and international bodies, including the killing of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and a gun attack on the Italian consul's car this month.

Britain's recent call to its nationals to leave immediately due to a "specific and imminent" threat to Westerners highlights the insecurity plaguing Benghazi.

The assault on the U.S. mission, for which no arrests were made, grabbed world attention. But there had already been attacks on British, Red Cross and U.N. properties here.

An Algerian hostage crisis in January, in which Islamist militants apparently entered from Libya and seized a natural gas plant before Algerian troops stormed it, leaving nearly 70 captives and gunmen dead, has raised regional security concerns.

Randy Robinson, principal of British School Benghazi, said: "One of our staff was carjacked. Our residence last spring was robbed with teachers in a room held at gunpoint as thieves cleaned out the apartments. We have to take care."

Two years ago the anti-Gaddafi uprising had the strongest support in Benghazi but today a very different mood has emerged.

"Most people here would say they are very unhappy," a local oil worker said. "Some say they are worse off than before."

Benghazans want their city to be the economic capital again and bodies like the National Oil Corporation, founded in Benghazi and later moved to Tripoli by Gaddafi, to return here. They have given the government until February 15 to make a decision.

"(Politicians) said they would do many things but there is no change," said Yussef al-Ghariani of the oil and gas workers' union. "People say they will do another revolution."

WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clintonissued a parting warning Thursday about Syria's civil war, accusingIran of playing an increasingly prominent role in directing the violence, which she said heightened the danger of a larger regional conflict that draws in Israel or other neighbors.

"I've done what was possible to do," Clinton told reporters on the eve of her last day as secretary of state.

But she painted a harrowing picture of a war that could still get worse.

"The worst kind of predictions about what could happen internally and spilling over the borders of Syria are certainly within the realm of the possible now," she said.

The conflict "is distressing on all fronts," Clinton told a roundtable of journalists Thursday, a day before John Kerry is sworn in as her successor. She pointed the finger primarily at Iran, accusing it of dispatching more personnel and better military materiel to President Bashar Assad's regime to help him defeat rebel forces. Its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, is also playing a bigger role in the conflict.

"The Iranians are all in for Assad, and there is very little room for any kind of dialogue with them," Clinton said.

She spoke after Syria threatened Thursday to retaliate for an Israeli airstrike, and its ally Iran warned ominously that the Jewish state would regret the attack.

In a letter to the U.N. secretary-general, Assad's regime stressed its "right to defend itself, its territory and sovereignty" and holding Israel and its supporters accountable. And Ali Abdul-Karim Ali, Assad's ambassador in Lebanon, said his government maintained "the option and the capacity to surprise in retaliation."

Clinton declined to talk specifically about Israel's strike, which U.S. officials described as targeting trucks containing sophisticated Russian-made SA-17 anti-aircraft missiles. The trucks were next to a military research facility, and the strike hit both the trucks and the facility, U.S. officials said.

If the SA-17s were to have reached Hezbollah, they would have greatly inhibited the Israeli air force's ability to operate in Lebanon, where Israel has flown frequent sorties in recent years. The attack has inflamed regional tensions already running high over Syria's 22-month-old civil war, and which has already led to deaths in neighboring Turkey and Lebanon.

In her strikingly candid assessment, Clinton spread the criticism to Russia, which has stymied U.S.-led efforts to set global sanctions against the Syrian regime at the U.N. Security Council. Washington and Moscow have remained in a three-way dialogue with the U.N. special envoy for Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, since late last year, but Clinton said the Russians were simultaneously providing financial assistance and military equipment to Assad.

"The Russians are not passive bystanders in their support for Assad. They have been much more active," she told reporters. "But maybe they will change. And maybe they will be more open to an international solution because they can't look at what's happening and not believe it could be incredibly dangerous to everyone's interests, including theirs."

Despite the dismal outlook of the war, Clinton stressed she in no way has softened her opposition to the United States providing weapons to Syrian rebels or intervening militarily to halt the conflict. Asked about America's Gulf allies who have sent arms to the Syrian opposition, Clinton said the Obama administration continues to urge caution on the types of materiel being supplied and vetting recipients.

The U.S. fears that if extremist groups get dangerous weapons, they could then use them against American interests or Israel.

"Sitting here today, I can't tell you that we've been entirely successful in that," Clinton said. "There are those who are supplying weapons and money for weapons, who really don't care who gets it as long as they are against Assad — and who have the view that once Assad is gone, then we'll deal with the consequences of these other groups who are now armed and funded. That's not our view."

She stressed that a political solution was necessary, and defended Syria's top opposition leader for suggesting earlier this week that he'd be willing to negotiate with members of Assad's regime. The call provoked an outcry from rebels who insist that Assad must step down first.

And she urged Kerry to press on with efforts at the United Nations and elsewhere to "create more credibility for the opposition" and create the possibility for more forceful international action to end the war.

"I think I've done what was possible to do over the last two years in trying to create or help stand up an opposition that was credible and could be an interlocutor in any kind of political negotiation," Clinton said. "We've engaged in a steady drumbeat of activities and trying to put together a coalition and trying to find a way to get something through the Security Council that would serve as the international legal basis for further action to be taken by many countries."