Tijuana municipal police detained two men early Monday morning after catching them attempting to set a parked car on fire in the Obrera neighborhood, according to Punto Norte. Officers later connected the suspects to an armed robbery of a nearby taqueria hours earlier.
Police spotted one of the suspects spraying gasoline on a parked Nissan around 5 a.m. in a dead-end alley near a Calimax supermarket. A second suspect waited in another vehicle. Both men fled on foot when officers approached but were apprehended without resistance.
At the scene, investigators recovered two orange cardboard signs. One read “FIRST AND LAST WARNING.” The other displayed a Veracruz phone number with the word “COMMUNICATE.” Police described the signs as typical of extortion tactics used by criminal groups to intimidate business owners into paying protection fees.
The suspects were identified as Félix Alejandro, 19, a Tijuana native, and José Ángel, 23, originally from Sinaloa. Inside their vehicle, officers found a cash register and other items stolen from the taqueria, along with personal belongings taken from robbery victims during the earlier holdup.
Obrera is a working-class neighborhood in central Tijuana, east of the Zona Norte tourist district and within walking distance of the San Ysidro border crossing. Small businesses there, including taquerias, auto shops, and corner stores, have long been targets of extortion schemes in which criminal groups demand regular payments and threaten arson or violence against owners who refuse.
The case has been referred to the Fiscalía General del Estado, Baja California’s state attorney general’s office, for prosecution. Police did not say whether the taqueria’s owner had previously received extortion demands or whether the arson target was connected to the business.