Moscow suggests missiles have yet to reach Assad

11 vanish from Mexico City bar in suspected kidnap

A woman holds up a sign with details of her recently disappeared relative during a protest in Mexico City, Thursday, May 30, 2013. Eleven young people were kidnapped in broad daylight from a Mexico City bar, just 20 days after the grandson of civil rights leader Malcolm X was beaten to death at a nightclub in the capital, anguished relatives said Thursday. The sign reads in Spanish "Looking for Said Sanches, 19-years-old, 1.85 meters, has not been seen since Saturday in Zona Rosa in Heaven." The mother of one of the missing youths says 11 people in all vanished from the after-hours club about 1 ½ blocks from the U.S. embassy, on the other side of Reforma Avenue. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)

A man holds up a sign with details of his recently disappeared relative during a protest in Mexico City, Thursday, May 30, 2013. Eleven young people were kidnapped in broad daylight from a Mexico City bar, just 20 days after the grandson of civil rights leader Malcolm X was beaten to death at a nightclub in the capital, anguished relatives said Thursday. The sign reads in Spanish "Help us find him. Rafael Rojas Marines. Disappeared in the after-hours Heaven. Asking for your support!" The mother of one of the missing youths says 11 people in all vanished from the after-hours club about 1 ½ blocks from the U.S. embassy, on the other side of Reforma Avenue. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Eleven young people were brazenly kidnapped in broad daylight from an after-hours bar in Mexico City's Zona Rosa, a normally calm district of offices, restaurants, drinking spots and dance clubs, anguished relatives said Thursday.

The apparent mass abduction purportedly happened sometime between 10 a.m. and noon on Sunday morning just off the Paseo de la Reforma, the city's main boulevard, near the Angel of Independence monument and only about 1½ blocks from the U.S. Embassy.

The incident was the second recent high-publicity blemish for the city's largely unregulated entertainment scene, coming 20 days after the grandson of American civil rights activist Malcolm X was beaten to death at another tough bar in the downtown area.

Calling for authorities to find their loved ones, family members marched Thursday morning from the Interior Department building to the Zocalo, the city's main square. Later they protested outside the bar, which bears a sign that reads Bicentenario Restaurante-Bar, and demanded to see the bar's surveillance video.

"How could so many people have disappeared, just like that, in broad daylight?" said Josefina Garcia, mother of Said Sanchez Garcia, 19, her only son. "The police say they don't have them, so what, the earth just opened up and swallowed them?"

She said her son wasn't involved in any criminal activity, and worked at a market stall selling beauty products.

City prosecutors said they had received 11 missing-person reports, but Garcia said residents of the tough downtown neighborhood of Tepito where the victims live thought as many as 15 or 16 people could have been abducted.

The known missing include six men, most in their 20s, a 16-year-old boy and four young women.

While no clear motives had been revealed in the attack, residents of Tepito said there has been a wave of abductions of neighborhood young people in recent months that could be related to organized crime activities. Tepito is the center of black market activities in the city, where guns, drugs, stolen goods and contraband are widely sold.

Mass abductions have been rare in Mexico City, but are common in parts of the country where drug cartels operate and are fighting with rival gangs over territory.

Prosecutors slapped closure stickers on the front doors of the Mexico City bar Thursday, with inscriptions saying the city's anti-kidnapping unit was investigating abductions at the site.

Late Thursday night, dozens of members of a special police intervention unit, many carrying automatic weapons and wearing helmets and bullet-proof vests, blocked off the street in front of the bar and searched inside. Officers would not comment on what they were looking for.

Isabel Fonseca, whose brother is among those missing, said a man who escaped told her that masked men arrived in several white SUVs and took the group away. She said her brother, Eulogio Fonseca, is a street vendor who sells cellphone accessories.

"We want them alive," Fonseca said. "They went out to have fun; they are not criminals."

Mexico City's chief prosecutor, Rodolfo Rios, said investigators had been able to glean very little information on the disappearances.

Relatives believe the youths were at the club, which they said is called "Heaven," around midmorning Sunday, when waiters and bar employees herded them out to the street and armed men bundled them into waiting vehicles and spirited them away.

Rios said police had not located any employees of the bar and no other witnesses had presented themselves.

"We aren't sure what exactly occurred," he said. "No witness has come forward to say anything about any armed gang."

The bar is down a side street from two high-rise office buildings that look out on Reforma and sits across the narrow road from beauty salons and a sushi restaurant.

Guillermo Bustamante, owner of one the beauty parlors, said the street bustles every Saturday morning with people coming and going from the bar.

"Every time we arrived on Saturdays, we would see weird people coming out of that bar," Bustamante said. "There would be many Hummers parked outside and men walking out with a woman on each arm."

Bars of questionable character are often allowed to continue operating, even though drugs may be sold inside and the businesses frequently violate rules governing closing times, parking and serving alcohol to minors.

Malcolm Shabazz, grandson of the late Malcolm X, died May 9 in a fight that erupted after he and a friend were presented with a $1,200 bill at a seedy bar near Plaza Garibaldi, a gathering place for mariachi bands in a rough neighborhood in the downtown area. Two waiters at the bar have been arrested in connection with Shabazz's death.

In June 2008, police raided another Mexico City bar to investigate drug and alcohol sales to minors. A stampede ensued as panicked youths rushed for the exits and police tried to stop them. A dozen young people died in the stampede.

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Associated Press writer Adriana Gomez Licon contributed to this report.

Alarm grows as Iraqi forces fail to stem violence

Baghdad municipality workers clean up while restaurant staff react after a parked car bomb exploded near the popular restaurant in the Ur neighborhood in northern Baghdad, Iraq, Thursday, May 30, 2013. A series of bomb explosions in Baghdad and the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Thursday killed and wounded dozens in the latest eruption of violence rattling the country, officials said. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)

Workers inspect their destroyed restaurant after a parked car bomb exploded near the popular restaurant in the Ur neighborhood in northern Baghdad, Iraq, Thursday, May 30, 2013. A series of bomb explosions in Baghdad and the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Thursday killed and wounded dozens in the latest eruption of violence rattling the country, officials said.(AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)

BAGHDAD (AP) — Officials in Iraq are growing increasingly concerned over an unabated spike in violence that claimed at least another 33 lives on Thursday and is reviving fears of a return to widespread sectarian fighting.

Authorities announced plans to impose a sweeping ban on many cars across the Iraqi capital starting early Friday in an apparent effort to thwart car bombings, as the United Nations envoy to Iraqwarned that "systemic violence is ready to explode."

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, meanwhile, was shown on state television visiting security checkpoints around Baghdad the previous night as part of a three-hour inspection tour, underscoring the government's efforts to show it is acting to curtail the bloodshed.

Iraqi security forces are struggling to contain the country's most relentless round of violence since the 2011 U.S. military withdrawal.

The rise in violence follows months of protests against the Shiite-led government by Iraq's Sunni minority, many of whom feel they've been marginalized and unfairly treated since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Tensions escalated sharply last month after a deadly crackdown by security forces on a Sunni protest camp.

Sunni militants, including al-Qaida, have long targeted Iraq's Shiite majority and government security forces. But Sunni mosques and other targets have also been struck over the past several weeks, raising the possibility that Shiite militias are also growing more active.

Several members of the security forces were killed in Thursday's bombings. The attacks also included an assassination attempt by a suicide bomber targeting a provincial governor in the country's Sunni-dominated west.

"These daily patterns of car bomb attacks ... in Baghdad and some other cities (are) really unacceptable for the people of Iraq, who have suffered so much," Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said Thursday.

"It's the government's responsibility to redouble its efforts, to revise its security plans, to contain this wave, to prevent it from sliding into sectarian conflict and war," he added. "That should not happen again."

The spike in violence, which has gained momentum since the middle of the month, is raising worries that Iraq is heading back toward the widespread sectarian bloodletting that spiked in 2006 and 2007 and pushed the country to the brink of civil war.

More than 500 people have been killed in May. The month before was Iraq's deadliest since June 2008, according to a United Nations tally that put April's death toll at more than 700.

"Iraq is a reactor that's overheating and there's little coolant available," said Ramzy Mardini, an analyst at the Beirut-based Iraq Institute for Strategic Studies. "Iraq's nascent politics is not equipped to sustain the current dangerous levels of internal and external pressure. There needs to be an off-ramp to relieve some of the pressure."

The vehicle ban coming into effect Friday applies to cars bearing temporary black license plates. Those plates are common in post-war Iraq, where for years it was difficult to obtain new ones. They are typically on older-model vehicles and are more difficult to trace, and authorities say they are frequently used in car bombings.

Most of Thursday's blasts erupted in Baghdad.

Car bombs killed four in the northeastern Shiite neighborhood of Binouq, and three died in a bombing at a market selling spare car parts in central Baghdad, according to police. In Baghdad's eastern Shiite Ur neighborhood, a parked car bomb went off next to an army patrol, killing four and wounding 17, police said.

Police officials also said that a roadside bomb exploded near a police patrol in the largely Shiite central commercial district of Karradah, killing three people there. That explosion shattered glass on several storefronts and left the stricken police unit's modified Ford pickup truck charred and mangled.

"What have these innocent people done to deserve this?" asked witness Sinan Ali. "So many people were hurt. Who is responsible?"

In Baghdad's northern Shiite neighborhood of Shaab, a car bomb exploded in a commercial area, killing six civilians and wounding 17 others.

In the largely Sunni neighborhood of Azamiyah in the capital's north, a car bomb struck near a military convoy, killing three people, including two soldiers, according to police. Another 14 people were wounded in that attack.

A bomb hidden on a minibus killed three and maimed eight in the eastern mixed Sunni-Shiite New Baghdad neighborhood. And a police patrol was struck in the southern neighborhood of Saydiyah, wounding six.

Hospital officials confirmed the casualties.

In Anbar province, the provincial governor escaped an assassination attempt when a suicide bomber rammed his explosive-laden car into his convoy, his deputy Dhari Arkan said. The governor escaped unharmed, but four of his guards were wounded.

Anbar is a vast Sunni-dominated province west of Baghdad that for months has been the center of protests against the Shiite-led government.

In the former insurgent stronghold city of Mosul, about 360 kilometers (225 miles) northwest of Baghdad, a suicide bomber attacked a federal police checkpoint, killing three people, according to police.

And to the west of Mosul, a suicide attacker drove his explosives-packed car into a security checkpoint, killing two members of the security forces and two civilians, according to a police officer and a doctor. Eight other people were wounded in the attacks in the town of Tal Afar, they added.

All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to talk to the media.

The United Nations envoy to Iraq, Martin Kobler, urged Iraqi leaders to do more to "pull the country out of this mayhem."

"Systemic violence is ready to explode at any moment," he said in a statement.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks but blame for many of the attacks is likely to fall on al-Qaida's Iraq arm, which frequently carries out bombings against civilians and security forces in an effort to undermine faith in the Shiite-led government.

Other militant groups have also grown more active in recent months, including the Army of the Men of the Naqshabandi Order, which has ties to members of Saddam Hussein's now-outlawed Baath party.

The attacks began hours after bomb blasts tore through two Baghdad neighborhoods Wednesday evening, killing at least 30, including several members of a wedding party in the mixed Sunni-Shiite Jihad neighborhood.

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Associated Press writers Qassim Abdul-Zahra and Sinan Salaheddin contributed to this story.

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