BY SUSANA HAYWARD
Knight Ridder News Service

MEXICO CITY - Hundreds of police officers dressed in riot gear stormed the town of San Juan Ixtayopan southeast of Mexico City until the early hours of Thursday, kicking down doors and arresting 33 suspects in Tuesday's burning deaths of two federal police officers.

The massive operation, which began late Wednesday and involved elite officers wearing night-vision goggles and ski masks and backed by helicopters, contrasted sharply with the lack of response Tuesday when a mob beat three officers before dousing two of them with gasoline and setting them on fire. The third officer was rescued when reinforcements arrived more than three hours after the attack began.

There was still no explanation as to why police took so long to respond to calls for help from the officers, who were beaten for nearly two hours before being set on fire. News crews dispatched from central Mexico City, 40 miles away, arrived hours before the first police reinforcements.

''I can't understand why, given how long those acts took, there wasn't a quicker reaction by authorities,'' Attorney General Rafael Macedo la Concha said Thursday at a news conference.

POLITICAL RESULTS

The incident appeared likely to become a central rallying cry in Mexico's already tumultuous presidential campaign, even though that vote won't take place until 2006.

Leaders from the Business Coordinating Council, in a statement to reporters, blamed Mexico City Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador. López Obrador, a member of the left-leaning Revolutionary Democratic Party, currently is considered the front-runner to replace President Vicente Fox, a member of the conservative National Action Party.

The Business Council, which has criticized López Obrador's administration for a rise in crime in Mexico City, said authorities were ``negligent, lazy, cowards and showed absolute disdain for the life of the victims.''

Fox agreed López Obrador should assume some responsibility. ''The mayor is in charge of security in the Federal District,'' he said.

POLICE ACTIONS

Police used photos and video clips taken by news crews to identify the suspects, many of whom were pulled from their homes by their hair in the middle of the night.

The arrested included four men suspected of providing the gasoline and matches.

Macedo said his office was investigating local and federal agents as well as Fatima Mena, the mayor of the municipality of Tlahuac, where San Juan Ixtayopan is located.

San Juan Ixtayopan lies inside Mexico's Federal District, and Mexico City officials are responsible for law enforcement there.

Several hundred agents and mounted police continued to patrol the town Thursday. Residents put a sign at the kiosk where the rescued officer, Edgar Moreno, had been tied up about to be burned. It read: ''Innocent or guilty, police or civilians, nobody has the right to take someone's life, much less the way it was done.'' Moreno remained in critical condition at a Mexico City hospital.

The three officers, members of the Federal Preventive Police, were dragged from their car outside the Popol Vuh elementary school as afternoon classes finished, when children and residents screamed they were child kidnappers.

Mexico City's judicial police officials said Thursday that the three were investigating 27 accusations, most of them about small-time drug trafficking but including five child kidnappings.

Residents on Thursday made public a letter sent to municipal leader Mena two weeks earlier about a ''suspicious group'' in a gray car videotaping children at the elementary school and a nearby day-care center.

Several residents told police that a family-operated candy business across from the school was selling drugs to children.

POLICE BLAME

Meanwhile, authorities continued to blame traffic for the delay in getting reinforcements to San Juan Ixtayopan.

''We would have liked to have gotten there a lot earlier,'' said Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico City's secretary of Public Security. ``You can't move 600 men in helicopters.''

Interviewed by reporters, several colleagues of the victims complained that their higher-ups ``let them die alone.''

Hundreds of people attended the Mexico City burial Thursday of one of the dead officers, Víctor Mireles Barrera.

The second officer, Cristobal Bonilla Colin, was to be buried Thursday in Queretaro, north of Mexico City.

Knight Ridder special correspondent Janet Schwartz contributed to this report.