Mexican investigators said Thursday they had found the burned and decapitated bodies of four people that may be linked to the gruesome case of five abducted teens, one of whom appeared to be filmed being forced to kill others.
Prosecutors in the western state of Jalisco said the body was badly burned and has yet to be identified. But the bodies were found in a building near pictures of the youths who had been kidnapped a week earlier and were later held captive.
The beheadings also matched details of a video showing a member of the group apparently being forced to saw off his friend’s head with a knife.
Families of the missing said the men in the photos and videos matched the clothing and appearance of their relatives.
The horrific video has brought Mexico back to the darkest days of drug cartel brutality in the early 2000s.
It also raised questions about whether President Andrés Manuel López Obrador heard — or pretended not to hear — concerns raised aloud by reporters during Wednesday morning news conferences. Argument of the issue of the case.
López Obrador played an audio recording of the previous day’s press conference on Thursday, in which no explicit questions were heard. Still, the president paid little attention to the case Thursday, spending about a minute saying the murder was “very regrettable” while spending more time discussing baseball.
Jalisco state officials said they were investigating the grisly video but also urged federal prosecutors to take over the case because drug cartels appear to be involved. López Obrador said the decision was made by the federal attorney general.
The creepiest thing about the video isn’t just the pair of bound, lifeless bodies in the foreground during the recording. In fact, the young man, who was seen punching and apparently beheading another victim, himself appeared to be a fourth member of the abducted group of friends.
A fifth member of the group may have been a body previously found by police in a burnt-out car in the area.
The youths disappeared a week ago en route to a festival in the Lagos town of de Moreno, an area known for cartel violence. Investigators searched a row of brick buildings at the ranch and found blood on the floor and shoes strewn about.
“This indicates that the five teens were on that ranch,” prosecutors said in a statement Wednesday.
If confirmed, the footage – in which offscreen people throw bricks at the teen so he can hit the victim with them – will recall some of the cartel’s most horrific brutality, in which kidnappings Victims were forced to surrender. Just kill each other.
In 2010, the old Zetas drug cartel kidnapped men from a bus and forced anyone who refused to work for the cartel to kill each other with a sledgehammer.
The tragedy came to light in 2011, when authorities in the northern border state of Tamaulipas discovered 48 secret graves containing the bodies of 193 people. Most had their skulls crushed with a sledgehammer, many of them Central American immigrants.
