Police arrested 17 men on Wednesday on suspicion of attacking youths and raping five women and girls who were on a church camping trip outside Mexico City — a brutal assault that shocked much of the country.
State of Mexico Attorney General Alfredo Castillo said 11 of the gang members were identified by some of the victims. In interrogation videos played for reporters, three of the suspects confessed that they sexually abused the women and girls because fellow attackers told them to.
Two of the suspects were local police officers and another had served in the military, Castillo said, speaking two days after authorities announced the arrest of a man who was described as not directly involved in the assault on the camp-out, but who allegedly provided information to the assailants.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon met with parents and lawyers of the victims on Wednesday to discuss the crime.
Sponsored by a church group, 90 youths were camping on Friday at an eco-park on the eastern outskirts of Mexico City when a group of armed men stormed into the hilly area. The attackers went on an hours-long rampage of beatings, robberies and rapes at the site close to the lower flanks of the Popocatepetl volcano.
The episode and a similar mass robbery and rape attack in February at a spot nearby have reduced city residents’ trust in the serenity of the wooded hills around the city and interrupted a decades-old tradition of outdoors activities in the pine and fir forests.
Prosecutors have said the latest attack was not related to organized crime or drug gangs. Common criminals, robbers and rapists have been targeting hikers and campers on the city’s outskirts.
Mexico’s equivalent of the Boy Scouts said on Tuesday that it was recommending scouts not to go on hikes in small groups and avoid about 11 wooded areas on the outskirts of Mexico City.
The Scouts Association of Mexico said future hikes should ask for police protection if necessary. The group’s statement said it coordinated a recent hike with local police departments.
Gerardo Catano, who leads tours and a mountain rescue group in the township of Tlamanalco on the slopes of the volcanoes that ring Mexico City, said the number of hikers and campers has fallen about 90 percent in the wake of the most recent attack.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited