MONTREAL — A 27-year-old man from Quebec was shot to death in Mexico’s Pacific coast beach town of Puerto Escondido, prosecutors said Tuesday.
Oaxaca state prosecutors said Victor Masson was found dead in a car with a bullet wound on Monday in a neighbourhood of Puerto Escondido where few tourists stay. Prosecutors did not provide any possible motive in the slaying.
The prosecutors did not release his hometown, but Quebec media outlet Le Quotidien reported that Masson was from Chicoutimi, in the province's Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean region.
Annie Viau, a family spokesperson who described herself as Masson's brother's partner, confirmed the death but gave few other details.
"You understand that the family of Victor Masson is in shock and that members learned of the death through the media," Viau told The Canadian Press in an emailed statement written in French and Spanish.
Viau said the family was asking for privacy, "fearing that the dissemination of false information in the context of this file could interfere with the investigation."
Masson was the second foreign tourist killed in the southern state of Oaxaca in less than a week. His killing comes three days after a man from Argentina was seriously wounded in a machete attack in another coastal town in Oaxaca. Prosecutors said Monday the Argentine tourist — whose name was not released — died of his injuries at a hospital in Mexico City.
He was among a group of three Argentines who were attacked by a Mexican man with a machete on Friday in the hamlet of La Isla, at the mouth of the Laguna de Chacahua, on the Pacific coast. The other two tourists were also wounded, but they were expected to survive.
Laguna de Chacahua is about 100 kilometres west of Puerto Escondido.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 17, 2023.
— With files from The Associated Press
The Canadian Press
