MEXICO CITY: Mexican authorities have arrested 16 police officers suspected of protecting four members of a notorious drug cartel for the massacres of at least 145 people in a northern border state.
Attorney General Marisela Morales said the police were from San Fernando, Tamaulipas, where authorities have unearthed mass graves holding scores of bodies. The body count likely will rise as digging continues, officials warned Thursday.
The police officers allegedly shielded from law enforcement four people three men and a woman authorities believe were directly responsible for the killings.
"All are members of the criminal organization Los Zetas," Morales said of the four, who were not identified.
The victims apparently were passengers on public buses running routes through San Fernando to Reynosa and Matamoros, two Mexican cities on the border with the United States.
"The federal government reiterates its commitment to solve these lamentable and reprehensible homicides, and end the corruption of the police force which has made a pact with organized crime," Morales said in a statement.
The government offered a $3.8 million reward for information leading to the capture of the four chief suspects.
Tamaulipas Governor Morelos Jaime Canseco told reporters there was no evidence the San Fernando police were directly involved in the massacres.
But, he said, "the conclusion was reached that some members of the municipal police were involved with the criminals and they were transferred to the capital for questioning."
Authorities had previously arrested 17 people linked to Los Zetas, a notorious gang formed in the 1990s by ex-military commandos now engaged in a fight to the death with their former bosses, the Gulf cartel.
Experts say the war with the Gulf cartel has cut into the gang's income, and so it has turned to fuel theft and kidnapping of migrants for money.
Meanwhile, 70 of the bodies recovered so far were transported Thursday to Mexico City to further the identification process, a justice official told AFP.
"They have been taken for embalming and analysis by the Forensic Medical Service," the spokesman said.
The bodies had been transported from Matamoros, in the state of Tamaulipas, where the remaining bodies were still kept. Dozens of people in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, were waiting to see whether their missing relatives had been found in the mass graves.
Authorities believe most of the victims were Mexicans, although only three bodies have been positively identified two Mexicans and a Guatemalan.
San Fernando was the same municipality where Los Zetas last year kidnapped and slaughtered 73 immigrants from Central and South America on their way north to try to illegally cross into the United States.
The Ministry of Defense separately announced it had captured a top associate of cartel boss Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.
Sabori Raul Cisneros was arrested Wednesday in the northwestern state of Sonora, which borders the United States. He is accused of kidnapping and killing two police officers last year.
Authorities also found on Thursday the bodies of eight men, heaped in a pile and with signs of torture and gunshots to the head, in the western state of Michoacan.
The state, among Mexico's most violent, is the stronghold of La Familia, the drug cartel considered the country's largest producer and trafficker of illicit synthetic drugs bound for the United States.
Seven major drug gangs are operating in Mexico, and over 34,600 people have been killed since December 2006 in violence related to raging wars for control of smuggling routes and government efforts to stamp them out.
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