The tortured body of a Mexican police reporter was found on the side of a road in Sonora State on Friday, a day after he was kidnapped by gunmen while waiting at a car wash, authorities said.
Marco Antonio Avila Garcia’s body was found inside a black plastic bag near the city of Empalme, about 110km south of Ciudad Obregon, where he was abducted, Sonora state prosecutors’ spokesman Jose Larrinaga said.
Larrinaga said police also found a message signed by a cartel, but he would not reveal the message’s content.
Photo: EPA
The 39-year-old reporter often wrote about organized crime for the sister newspapers Diario Sonora de la Tarde and El Regional de Ciudad Obregon, Larrinaga said.
Avila was snatched and forced into a pickup truck on Thursday by three masked gunmen as he waited for a company car to be washed in Ciudad Obregon. Eduardo Flores, director of the newspapers, said Avila wrote about drug trafficking, but never mentioned cartels by name nor did investigative pieces.
“He wrote about drug trafficking, but nothing involved” about it, Flores said. “He wasn’t allowed to cover anything that would be considered aggressive by criminal groups.”
Flores said Avila was among the most experienced police reporters on his staff. The journalist never mentioned receiving threats or being afraid of covering the police beat. No threats had been received by the newspapers, he added.
The reporter was married and had three small children. He worked at night and during the day was going to university. He recently graduated with a degree in chemistry.
Mexico has become one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists in recent years, with media workers disproportionately targeted. Last week, gunmen opened fire on the offices of the El Manana newspaper in the border city of Nuevo Laredo. The week before, police found the mutilated bodies of three photojournalists inside plastic bags dumped in a canal in Veracruz State.
Prosecutions in journalist killings are rarely carried out, which is generally the case with most homicides and other serious crimes in Mexico.
The Mexican National Commission on Human Rights says 81 journalists were killed between 2000 and this year. In addition, it said 14 have disappeared. Other press freedom groups differ with that number.
The commission said on Friday it had opened an investigation into the death of Rene Orta Salgado, a journalist who had quit working for El Sol de Cuernavaca newspaper in the resort city of Cuernavaca in January. Police found Orta’s body inside his car’s trunk last Sunday; he had apparently been strangled.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
RSS