A drug gang that carried out the first successful car bombing against Mexican security forces likely used an industrial explosive that organized crime gangs in the past have stolen from private companies, a U.S. official said Monday.

The assailants apparently used Tovex, a water gel explosive commonly used as a replacement for dynamite in mining and other industrial activities, said the U.S. official, who is familiar with the investigation but spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the Mexican-led investigation.

The U.S. official had no other details on how the bomb was constructed, and Mexican officials declined to comment.

The car bomb killed three people _ including a federal police officer _ Thursday in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, and introduced a new threat in Mexico’s drug war. Mexican authorities say the assailants lured police and paramedics to the scene through an elaborate ruse seemingly taken out of an Al-Qaida playbook.

A street gang tied to the Juarez cartel dressed a bound, wounded man in a police uniform, then called in a false report of an officer shot at an intersection. They waited until the authorities were in place to detonate the bomb.

Mexico’s drug violence has killed nearly 25,000 people since December 2006, when Calderon deployed thousands of troops and federal police to fight the cartels in their strongholds.

The government announced Monday it would send more federal troops to the northern state of Coahuila following the massacre of 18 people at a private party there. Gunmen stormed the party in the city of Torreon on Sunday and opened fire without saying a word.

Investigators had no suspects or information on a possible motive but Coahuila is among several northern Mexican states that have seen a spike in drug-related violence as the Gulf cartel and its former enforcers, the Zetas, fight for control of drug-trafficking routes.

The Coahuila state Attorney General’s Office said in a statement Monday that the death toll rose to 18 overnight after one of the wounded died. There were 12 male and six female victims; among them were four teenagers, the youngest a 17-year-old boy. Seventeen were wounded.

The attack was ghastly, but no longer unprecedented in a region that is slammed day after day by gruesome slayings that authorities attribute to an increasingly brutal battle between drug gangs feuding over territory.

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