MEXICO CITY, Mexico (Reuters) -- Gunmen killed a boss of one of Mexico's main drug cartels and two other people in an ambush at a cinema complex, and five of the assailants were killed in shootouts with police shortly afterward, prosecutors said Sunday.

Paid killers shot and killed Rodolfo Carrillo Fuentes, a chief of the Ciudad Juarez cartel, at a cinema complex Saturday night in the northwestern town of Culiacan.

Two other people, including Carrillo Fuentes' girlfriend, were killed and a former top detective accompanying the drug lord was wounded.

"One of the dead was Rodolfo Carrillo Fuentes, known as a leader of the Juarez cartel," said Elisa Perez, spokeswoman for the Sinaloa state prosecutors' office.

The gunmen fled the scene in two sport utility vehicles, one of them armored, but clashed with police who had set up roadblocks on highways out of Culiacan, Perez said.

Five of the gunmen, wielding automatic rifles, were killed in two separate shootouts with police, Perez said. Other weapons, including a grenade, were seized and two men arrested, she said.

Carrillo Fuentes, 29, was the brother of Amado Carrillo Fuentes who earned the nickname "Lord of the Skies" for his use of a fleet of aircraft to ship cocaine from Colombia in the 1990s.

He died in 1997 after undergoing plastic surgery in a Mexico City hospital.

Northern Mexico is a main route for cocaine, marijuana and other drugs into the United States.

Copyright 2004 Reuters.