Agencies/Mexico City
Police have found the charred body of a suspect in the kidnapping of 12 people from a Mexico City bar, more than a month after the mass abduction, prosecutors said.
The body of Dax Rodriguez Ledezma, one of the owners of the Heaven bar, was found alongside the burned remains of his girlfriend and another woman in Huitzilac, a town in the neighbouring state of Morelos, the capital’s prosecutor’s office said.
Authorities identified him after comparing DNA samples taken from his brother, Mario Rodriguez Ledezma, a co-owner of the bar who gave himself up to police and is being held in a Mexico City jail on kidnapping charges.
The after-hour bar’s security chief and another employee have also been charged over the May 26 abduction, which took place in broad daylight in the city’s trendy Zona Rosa district.
Mario Rodriguez’s wife is under preventive detention as authorities investigate whether she had a role in the kidnapping.
A third bar owner, Ernesto Espinosa Lobo, was detained last Friday and is also under investigation.
The city’s top prosecutor, Rodolfo Rios, says the kidnapping may be linked to a dispute between two gangs in Tepito, a rough neighborhood of the capital where several of the victims lived.
Meanwhile gunmen have kidnapped at least 17 people after bursting into several homes in a rural municipality in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, officials said. Traveling in several vehicles, the assailants snatched 12 men, three women and two high school students on Sunday in four areas of the central municipality of Cocula, said Guerrero state government spokesman Jose Villanueva.
Public security department sources said the figure may rise because authorities have yet to corroborate other alleged kidnappings reported by more families.
