Mexico gang beheads and mutilates bodies
Pastor Dale Morgan
Mexico gang beheads and mutilates bodies*
Wed Dec 19, 2007 10:12pm GMT
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Suspected drug smugglers have dumped the
beheaded and mutilated bodies of five people around the Mexican capital
in recent days in what appear to be revenge killings for a cocaine
seizure at the airport.
The severed heads of the men who worked for a private customs firm were
found near Mexico City airport on Saturday while their bodies appeared
just outside the city.
One of the heads had an index finger stuffed in its mouth and the other
had a finger in its ear.
Mexico's attorney general said over the weekend agents had seized half a
ton of cocaine found at the airport on a flight from Colombia.
Three other bodies, two of them headless and without an index finger,
were found this week in Tlalnepantla on the edge of the city. The hands
of the third body were chopped off. These three bodies have not been
identified.
"By the way they were killed, it leads us to believe they were
informants or that (drug dealers) were trying to send a message," Elena
Cardenas, a spokeswoman for Tlalnepantla municipality, said on
Wednesday. "'Listen, see, don't talk,' that's their motto," she said.
Mexico has been blighted by beheadings and other gory killings in a
3-year-old war between drug gangs for control of smuggling routes to the
United States.
President Felipe Calderon has deployed some 25,000 soldiers and federal
police to violence hot spots.
While the operations have led to a string of high-profile busts, drug
violence has still killed around 2,500 people this year.
On Wednesday, the attorney general's office said it had seized nearly 2
million pills of over-the-counter cold medicine containing
pseudoephedrine, which can be used to make the highly addictive
methamphetamine.
(Reporting by Cyntia Barrera Diaz; Editing by Eric Beech)