MEXICO CITY (AP) — Volunteer searchers in northern Mexico led authorities to a series of grisly finds: 17 bodies or skeletal remains buried in the backyards and patios of houses in a low-income housing development, prosecutors in the northern border state of Sonora said late Sunday.
Highlights
- Bodies found at abandoned houses in the city of Ciudad Obregon.
- Bodies had apparently been killed between six months and a year ago, prosecutors say.
- Some drug gangs use abandoned or rented dwellings as execution chambers for kidnap victims or suspected rivals.
- Mexico has more than 98,356 disappeared, according to government data.
- Most are thought to have been killed by drug cartels, their bodies dumped into shallow graves, burned or dissolved.
- Some 52,000 await identification of even the bodies that have been found, government data shows.