MEXICO CITY — The circumstances were all too typical in a drug war in which roadside ambushes involving armored sport utility vehicles are a staple. But in an ambush on Friday, the vehicle belonged to the United States Embassy, the wounded were two American employees and the assailants included federal police officers.
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The embassy employees were traveling around 8 a.m. on a road 35 miles south of here to a Mexican Navy base. The State Department declined to identify them or the agency or department they worked for — nearly every branch of the federal government is represented here — though the Drug Enforcement Administration said they were not its employees.
Their vehicle carried diplomatic plates. That might seem adequate to provide protection from hostilities, but not in Mexico, where last year a United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was killed and another was wounded when they were ambushed on a highway by an armed group who, the authorities said, mistook them for rivals.
In the ambush on Friday, the Mexican government conceded that the circumstances remained murky. In a statement, it said the police officers were still being questioned about what happened. A preliminary account issued by the government described a running gun battle.
The embassy vehicle was also carrying a Mexican Navy captain, who was taking the Americans to a training facility at the Mexican base. The S.U.V. was on a side road near a major highway when gunmen in another vehicle approached, showed their weapons and opened fire. The embassy vehicle was then pursued by three other vehicles.
At one point, shots rang out from those three vehicles and the embassy S.U.V. The statement does not make clear which, if any, of the pursuers was a federal police vehicle and when the officers might have opened fire.
The driver of the embassy vehicle called the Navy base, but the help it sent arrived after the shooting.
The government statement said the embassy vehicle was hit by police gunfire, but it did not say if the wounded American employees, who were being treated at a hospital and were expected to survive, had been struck by bullets from the police. State Department officials said they were working with the Mexican authorities on the investigation.
United States Embassy personnel are not usually targets in the pitched battles involving drug and organized crime groups — battles that have killed more than 50,000 people in the past six years.
But American officials have still been caught up in violence.
In 2010, an employee of the American Consulate in Ciudad Juárez, a city on the Texas border that is one of the most violent in Mexico, was killed along with her husband in what was believed to be a case of mistaken identity.
On Feb. 5, 2011, immigration and customs agents — Jaime Zapata, who was killed, and Victor Avila, who was wounded — had picked up unspecified equipment and were returning to Mexico City when gunmen ran their Chevrolet Suburban, also with diplomatic plates, off the road and fired on them.
No motive was given, but a Mexican man, Julian Zapata Espinoza, was charged with murder and extradited to the United States, where he is awaiting trial.
State Department officials said then that travel procedures would be reviewed.
But criminals and law enforcement authorities have been caught up before in firing on innocents, particularly those riding in vans or S.U.V.’s.
Human rights groups have criticized the Mexican Army in particular over a series of shootings at checkpoints that have killed several people who seemingly had no connection to crime.
The latest episode is also likely to raise further questions about the training of the federal police.
Last week, all 348 officers assigned to the Mexico City international airport were replaced after three federal police officers were shot to death at the food court of a busy terminal there by fellow officers suspected of involvement in the drug trade.
Karla Zabludovsky contributed reporting.
