Mexican authorities have confirmed that 12 bodies pulled from a mass grave last week belong to young people kidnapped from a Mexico City bar in May, an official said.
A 13th body was recovered from the grave outside the capital but officials have not indicated whom it might be.
Seven young men and five women ranging between 16 and 34 years of age were reported missing in the days after the group went to the bar in the Zona Rosa district on 26 May.
Surveillance footage showed some of them being led to cars outside the after-hours bar.
There was no obvious sign of force on the surveillance footage. The men who took them away were not masked and did not seem to be carrying weapons.
There was no trace of the missing people until their bodies were discovered in a grave covered with lime, cement and asbestos on the outskirts of Mexico City.
An official from the federal attorney general's office said the bodies were identified through DNA testing and other means.
The office said in a statement that the remains were handed over to the city prosecutors, who are leading the investigation.
But some relatives of the victims said they were shown clothing found at the grave but that they did not belong to their loved ones.
"The clothes they showed us don't belong to any of the kids," Leticia Ponce, mother of 16-year-old Jerzy Ortiz, told AFP.
The families refused to take the bodies because they first want independent forensic experts from Argentina to examine the remains.
The brazen mass killing has tarnished the capital's image as an oasis from the drug-related murders and kidnappings that have plagued the country in recent years.
More than 70,000 people have been killed in drug violence since 2006.
Official figures say 26,000 people have gone missing across Mexico since December 2006, when the army was deployed to fight crime gangs.
Amnesty International has accused the Mexican government was not doing enough to investigate the disappearances of thousands of people.
Wednesday 28 August 2013
http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/breaking/18690441/mexican-officials-identify-bodies-of-12-kidnap-victims/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-23840046
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