Mexico officials ID bodies as 5 of missing 12

Mexican authorities said Friday they have identified five bodies pulled from a mass grave as some of the 12 people kidnapped three months ago from a Mexico City bar almost within sight of the U.S. Embassy and the city's main boulevard.

Assistant attorney general Renato Sales told reporters that 13 badly decomposed bodies were pulled from a grave covered with cement, quicklime and asbestos discovered Thursday on a rural ranch east of Mexico City.

Ricardo Martinez, a lawyer for relatives of the missing, said there is no doubt the other bodies would also be identified as the missing youths, most of whom are from the rough Mexico City neighborhood of Tepito.

"They're going to wind up identifying all of them,"  because now it's proven that this is organized crime."

Officials said the remains are at federal labs, where experts are using DNA tests, and they expect to have all of them identified soon. There was no immediate explanation about how the 13th body was related to the kidnapped youths.

"At this point we have plainly identified through genetic testing Alan Omar Athiencia," aged 26, said Renato Sales, adding "we have sufficient evidence" to identify the bodies of two other men and two women.

The head of the federal forensics office, Sara Monica Medina, said the bodies of the other four — Gabriela Ruiz Martinez, Rafael Rojo Martinez, Guadalupe Morales Vargas, and Josue Piedra Moreno — had been identified from implants, tattoos and other physical characteristics, and further tests were pending.

Relatives of the victims, angry and agitated by the identification of some of the bodies, gathered outside the headquarters of Mexico City prosecutor's office to demand a meeting with the attorney general on Friday afternoon.

"This is bad, bad, bad," said Ana Maria Vargas, mother of Morales, who had three children and sold lingerie in Tepito. "I don't know what to say, I don't know what to do."

Investigators found a pistol, a shotgun and several pairs of handcuffs at a home on the ranch where the mass grave was found.

The young bar-goers vanished from the Heaven club at midday May 26, just a block from the leafy Paseo de Reforma, the capital's equivalent of the Champs-Elysees.

The bizarre disappearance resonated across the city of 9 million people because many had come to believe it was an oasis from the rampant drug violence that had led to discovery of mass graves elsewhere in the country.

While drug gangs have carried out multiple killings in Mexico City, seldom had they involved so many victims, and seldom have the victims been buried in mass graves, as drug gangs have frequently done in northern Mexico.

Authorities set up a perimeter more than a mile (1.5 kilometers) from the excavation site on a hilly ranch known as La Negra, where federal police and attorney general's trucks and large white vans were seen working the operation. The private property next to Rancho La Mesa Ecological Park is walled and surrounded by oak and pine trees.

The federal Attorney General's Office said agents had received information about possible illegal weapons on the property and obtained a search warrant. When they started looking around, they discovered the grave.

"They found a home that looked like a safe house," Murillo Karam told reporters Thursday. "We were operating under the belief it was a weapons case."

Prosecutors have said the abductions from the Heaven bar were linked to a dispute between street gangs that control local drug sales in the capital's nightclubs and bars. They say the gangs are based in the Tepito neighborhood where most of the missing lived. Two of the missing youths — whose bodies have still not been identified — are sons of imprisoned drug traffickers , but the families insist the missing young people were not involved in drug trafficking.

Surveillance cameras showed several cars pulling up to the bar at midday and taking the victims away. A witness who escaped told authorities that a bar manager had ordered the music turned off, told patrons that authorities were about to raid the establishment and ordered those inside to leave.

Those detained in the Heaven case include club owner Ernesto Espinosa Lobo, known as "The Wolf," who has been charged with kidnapping, as well as another bar owner, a driver and a security guard. A fifth person, Jose de Jesus Carmona, 32, is under arrest pending charges and another is a fugitive.

In another element of the case that is reminiscent of cartel warfare, one of the owners of the Heaven bar, Dax Rodriguez Ledezma, fled authorities only to turn up dead, his body dumped and burned in a rural area with that of his girlfriend and another friend.