Authorities in one of Mexico's largest cities announced yesterday that they had found seven bodies, five of them decapitated and one completely dismembered, in a stolen car left on the side of a major highway, the Associated Press reported.
Prosecutors in the central state of Puebla said all the bodies had been affixed with messages believed to explain the motives for the killings. Each victim is accused of committing a specific crime – from street drug dealing to truck robbery to extortion, prosecutors said.
„On each of the bodies, we found handwritten messages written on paper, each detailing the reason the person was killed,” Puebla State Attorney General Hilberto Higuera said.
Iguera did not mention whether the killings might be related to drug cartels.
Such messages are much more often left on the bodies of victims by drug cartels who want to threaten their rivals or punish the victim for behavior that violates their rules.
Iguera was extremely cautious in describing the evidence, but suggested that it was "not just a dispute (between gangs), but something to do with controlling specific people, aimed not only at subjugating them, but also to recruiting."
The grisly murders were particularly shocking because they took place in the relatively wealthy and large city of Puebla, very close to the capital of Mexico in the eastern direction.
Puebla is Mexico's fifth largest city and has so far been largely spared the drug cartel violence affecting surrounding areas.
Leaving the bodies in the middle of the expressway is also unusual. Police were quickly alerted to the car crammed with corpses, which blocked traffic on Puebla's main ring road.