MOSCOW, October 30 (RIA Novosti) — Four bodies have been found in Mexico, close to the border town of Matamoros where four young people disappeared over two weeks ago.
“Tamaulipas state investigator Raul Galindo Vira would only confirm that four bodies had been recovered and declined to discuss who they might be,” the Associated Press reports.
Another state official told the reporters that investigators were trying to determine if the bodies were those of the four missing. Raquel Alvarado, mother of the three missing American siblings told AP that Mexican authorities had asked their father what they were wearing when they disappeared.
The missing people disappeared on October 13. Erica Alvarado Rivera, 26, traveled to Mexico with her boyfriend Jose Guadalupe Castaneda Benitez, 32, to meet with her father and two of her brothers, 22-year-old Alex and 21-year-old Jose Angel Alvarado.
Mother Raquel Alvarado had last week told Texas news channel KGBT-TV that the four met at a taco stand, and witnesses had told her that a group of armed men identifying themselves as members of a local Matamoros police unit known as Hercules kidnapped the group.
Alvarado told the channel: “We don’t know anything about them at this point, we don’t know why they took them, we don’t know why they were beaten, and they beat up my daughter too.” She added that she had tried to contact the Matamoros government for information about her children’s whereabouts, but had been given no information.
The foster mother of Jose Guadalupe Castaneda Benitez, Martha Hernandez, told AP on Wednesday "We will keep searching," for the missing, adding "they can't just disappear. We are going to be like in Guerrero."
On 23 September, 43 students went missing after a confrontation with local police in the town of Iguala, in the Mexican state of Guerrero. Last week the Mexican attorney general issued arrest warrants for town mayor Jose Luis Abarca, as well as his wife and the town’s police chief. The attorney general alleges that on the mayor’s orders, police stopped a planned protest by the students, and then handed them over to a local criminal gang.
Protestors last week took part in demonstrations, marches and rallies in 50 Mexican cities in support of the missing 43, including a 50,000 strong march in Mexico City.
