Investigation underway after severed heads and human remains found in Mexico

News.com.au

13 hours ago

Motorists have made a grisly discovery of severed human heads and remains on a road linking two Mexican states.
According to the AFP, authorities were called to the scene where they found six heads along a thoroughfare in central Mexico.
The remains were first reported by drivers using a road that links the states of Puebla and Tlaxcala, the prosecutors said.
A spokesman added the extreme violence is rarely see in the area.
Another head and other human remains were found in the western city of Colima, news outlets said Tuesday.
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The heads found in Tlaxcala were those of men, the prosecutor's office said as it announced an investigation into the shocking crime.
Local media reported a pamphlet was found which blamed the violence on a settling of scores between gangs that rob fuel.
Both Puebla and Tlaxcala are to home to gangs that deal in drugs and fuel.
But these states are new to this kind of extreme violence more common in other parts of Mexico, which is plagued by drug-related brutality.
However in recent months bodies have been found in areas near the border between the two states.
Extreme violence – such as decapitation – is more common in northern states and along the Pacific coast where drug cartels operate in both.
On June 30 authorities found 20 bodies along a road in northwest Sinaloa state, five of them headless, as violence reached new heights.
The bodies of four of the victims were hung from a bridge on a main road.
Sinaloa cartel, one of Mexico's major drug-trafficking groups, has been locked in an almost year-long conflict with another one of its factions.
The carnage escalated following the arrest of Ismael 'El Mayo' Zambada, an infamous drug lord who was arrested in July 2024 when he arrived into the US.
Zambada, aged in his 70s, had allegedly worked alongside Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman operating the cartel before the latter was sentenced to life in a Colorado jail.
'El Mayo' accused Guzman's son of betrayal by alerting authorities of his arrival to the US.
Zambada is expected to plead guilty to drug trafficking charges when he faces a New York court next week, after the US Justice Department said it would not see the death penalty.
Mexico's government had deployed thousands of soldiers to Sinaloa in a bid to end the violence that has left a reported 3000 people dead or missing.
However, they have struggled to put an end to the conflict.
In March 2022 six heads and other body parts were found on the roof of a car on the main street of Chilapa in the southern state of Guerrero.
Around 480,000 people have died in drug-related violence around Mexico since 2006, when the government deployed federal troops to take on the country's powerful drug cartels.