MEXICO CITY (AP) — A roadway bomb officials said was planted by a drug cartel in western Mexico has killed three police and prosecutors’ agents and wounded 10 people, the latest example of the increasingly open, military-style challenge posed by Mexico’s drug cartels.

The governor of the western state of Jalisco said the blast occurred late Tuesday in Tlajomulco, a suburb of the state capital, Guadalajara. Gov. Enrique Alfaro called the bombing cowardly and blamed it on an unnamed drug cartel.

“This is an unprecedented act that shows what these drug cartels are capable of,” Alfaro wrote on his social media accounts. “This attack also represents an open challenge to the Mexican government on all levels.”

It appeared to be among the first law enforcement deaths from an improvised explosive device, or IED, in Mexico. Such devices wounded ten soldiers in the neighboring state of Michoacan in 2022 and killed a civilian.

Alfaro did not say who he suspected of setting the bomb, but the Jalisco drug cartel has significant experience in using IEDs, as well as bomb-dropping drones.

Earlier Tuesday, a federal official acknowledged that another cartel had used a car bomb to kill a National Guard officer in the neighboring state of Guanajuato.

And on Monday in the neighboring state of Guerrero, protesters allied with yet another drug gang battled security forces, commandeered a police armored truck and used it to ram down the gates of the state legislature building.

The area around Guadalajara has seen bloody battle between factions of the Jalisco cartel, which has been blamed in the previous use of IEDs in Mexico.

In February 2022, in the Michoacan township of Aguililla, one roadside mine damaged an army vehicle and injured 10 soldiers. That was the first known successful use of IEDs against a military target in Mexico.

A few days later, another IED killed a farmer when he drove over the device in his pickup truck. The farmer’s son was wounded in the blast, which was apparently fueled by a device containing ammonium nitrate.

Special squads of Mexican army troops equipped with metal detectors and bomb suits were later deployed to the area. Dozens of such devices were found along rural roads and fields in the area around the township of Aguililla.

Those IEDs included devices detonated by radio or telephone signal, by pressure — as when someone steps on them — or even by vials that break and combine two chemicals.

The Jalisco cartel has been fighting the local Viagras gang, also known as United Cartels, for control of the area for years. Those battles have featured the use of trenches, pillboxes, homemade armored cars and drones modified to drop small bombs.

The cartels’ bomb-carrying drones have caused more terror in Michoacan than the land mines. While initially crude and dangerous to load and operate — and still worrisomely indiscriminate — drone warfare has improved, and it’s not unusual to see metal barn or shed roofs opened like tin cans from the impact of drone explosions.