Mexican authorities have arrested 16 police officers suspected of protecting four members of a notorious drug cartel over the massacres of at least 145 people in a northern border state.
Mexican Attorney General Marisela Morales said the police were from San Fernando, Tamaulipas, where authorities have unearthed mass graves holding scores of bodies. The body count likely will rise as digging continues, officials said on Thursday.
The police officers allegedly shielded from law enforcement four people — three men and a woman — authorities believed were directly responsible for the killings.
Photo: AFP
“All are members of the criminal organization Los Zetas,” Morales said of the four, who were not identified.
The victims apparently were passengers on public buses running routes through San Fernando to Reynosa and Matamoros, two cities on the border with the US.
“The federal government reiterates its commitment to solve these lamentable and reprehensible homicides and end the corruption of the police force, which has made a pact with organized crime,” Morales said in a statement.
The government offered a US$3.8 million reward for information leading to the capture of the four chief suspects.
Tamaulipas Governor Morelos Jaime Canseco told reporters there was no evidence the San Fernando police were directly involved in the massacres.
However, “the conclusion was reached that some members of the municipal police were involved with the criminals and they were transferred to the capital for questioning,” he said.
Authorities had previously arrested 17 people linked to Los Zetas, a notorious gang formed in the 1990s by ex-military commandos now engaged in a fight to the death with their former bosses, the Gulf cartel.
Experts say the war with the Gulf cartel has cut into the gang’s income, and so it has turned to fuel theft and kidnapping of migrants for money.
Seventy of the bodies recovered so far were transported on Thursday to Mexico City for identification, a justice official said.
“They have been taken for embalming and analysis by the Forensic Medical Service,” the spokesman said.
The bodies had been transported from Matamoros in the state of Tamaulipas, where the remaining bodies were still kept. Dozens of people in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, were waiting to see whether their missing relatives had been found in the mass graves.
Authorities believe most of the victims were Mexicans, although only three bodies have been positively identified — two Mexicans and a Guatemalan.
San Fernando was the same municipality where Los Zetas last year kidnapped and slaughtered 73 immigrants from Central and South America on their way north to try to illegally cross into the US.
The Ministry of Defense separately announced it had captured a top associate of cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
Sabori Raul Cisneros was arrested on Wednesday in the state of Sonora, which borders the US. He is accused of kidnapping and killing two police officers last year.
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