Mexico City - Four members of the music group Los Herederos de Sinaloa (the heirs of Sinaloa) were killed in Culiacan, the capital of the northern Mexican state of Sinaloa, police said Friday.

The band was attacked Thursday opposite the Sinaloa headquarters of the newspaper publisher Organizacion Editorial Mexicana, where one of the members had just been interviewed.

According to eyewitness reports, the attack was perpetrated by two young men with automatic weapons who emerged from a luxury SUV. Before they fled the scene, one of the attackers threw money onto one of the dead bodies.

Several musicians of a style known as "onda grupera" in Mexico have been killed in the past. Such murders started in 1992, with the death of Chalino Sanchez - the alleged inventor of the so-called "narcocorrido," a type of song that tells the feats of drug gangs.

Most of the bands in "onda grupera" sing of everyday life in northern Mexico, and sometimes the songs - which are mostly love songs - refer to drug lords or other events related to drug trafficking. (dpa)