Yesterday, a Mexican court gave 50-year sentences to 11 gunmen from a drug cartel for the massacre in 2010-2011 of 122 passengers who were taken off buses and forced to fight to death with hammers, reported AP, quoted by BTA.
The verdicts announced yesterday relate to one of the most gruesome chapters of Mexico's drug war, so horrific it was hard to believe until dozens of bodies were found in unmarked graves with their skulls smashed.
Federal prosecutors said the 11 suspects were arrested between 2015 and 2017 and have been held in prison since then. The trials against them lasted between seven and nine years.
At the time, prosecutors in the state of Tamaulipas said that members of the now-defunct Setas cartel; dropped off male passengers from buses traveling to the border city of Reynosa or to Matamoros, more pò to the east.
At the time, officials claimed that "Setas" suspected that a rival cartel was sending reinforcements by bus to the border towns they controlled. The gangsters took young men off the buses, interrogated them and offered some of them the chance to live and join the gang if they proved themselves worth it by fighting other innocent passengers with hammers.
This cruelty seemed incredible until forensic scientists began excavating scattered mass graves containing hundreds of bodies, almost all young men, many with fractured skulls, AP notes.