[Image: Gencraft/AI]
The bodies of nine young friends who vanished last month while on vacation in southern Mexico have been found brutally dismembered and discarded by the side of a highway.
A bag filled with severed hands lay nearby, a chilling signature of unimaginable violence.
The gruesome discovery unfolded in San Jose Miahuatlan, near the border of Puebla and Oaxaca, where an abandoned car and a blood-soaked tarp concealed the victims’ remains. Four mutilated corpses were crammed into the trunk, while five others were left beneath the tarp. Scattered among them was a bag containing eight pairs of hands, with two more left inside the vehicle.
The victims—four women and five men, aged between 19 and 30—had all been shot, their bodies bearing the unmistakable scars of torture. They had set out from Tlaxcala on February 27, eager for a beach getaway in Oaxaca. Instead, their journey ended in an execution-style massacre, per The New York Post.
Authorities traced their dark gray Volkswagen Vento to the remote crime scene, some 150 miles southeast of Mexico City. The names of most victims have been confirmed: Angie Lizeth, Leslie, Brenda Mariel, Jacqueline Ailet, Noemi Yamileth, Raul Emmanuel, Ruben Antonio, and Rolando Armando. One remains unidentified.
Despite the brutality, no suspects have been named. The Attorney General’s Office in Puebla is working with counterparts in Tlaxcala and Oaxaca, desperately hunting for those responsible. Surveillance footage from February 24 shows the victims’ car moving along the Atlixcayotl highway, 90 miles from where their bodies were later found—perhaps the last trace of them before they crossed an invisible line into the abyss.
“So far, I cannot offer information,” Idamis Pastor Betancourt, head of Puebla’s State Attorney General’s Office, stated grimly at a Monday press conference. “There are lines of investigation, but confidentiality prevents me from revealing them.”
Mexico saw a staggering 30,000 murders in 2023, the deadliest year in recent history. Most were linked to the ruthless grip of the drug trade.
Whether this massacre was part of that relentless cycle—or something even darker—remains a question that haunts the bloodstained highway where nine lives were mercilessly erased.
[Source: NY Post]
