| | |  News Around the Republic of Mexico | February 2009 
Mexico Tests Remains for US Anti-Kidnap Expert
 Robin Emmott - Reuters
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Monterrey, Mexico - Mexican police are running DNA tests on charred human bodies found in northern Mexico last week to see if an abducted U.S. anti-kidnap expert could be among them, a police official said on Friday.
Gunmen abducted Felix Batista, a Cuban-American credited with negotiating the release of hostages held by Colombian rebels in past years, in the industrial city of Saltillo, in the northern state of Coahuila, on December 10.
Police have not ruled out that Batista is still alive, but are examining the disfigured remains of 19 people found in eight shallow graves in the Coahuila desert, across the border from Texas. The graves contained severed limbs and teeth.
"These remains are of people killed by drug gangs over the past six months, that's why we are working with the hypothesis that Batista is among them," said an official at the Coahuila state attorney general's office who declined to be named.
Drug smugglers and police are killed every day in Mexico's vicious drug war. Their bodies occasionally dumped in mass graves, but Coahuila is one of the country's least violent states and "narco graves" are much less common there.
Police are following various lines of inquiry in Batista's case, the official said.
The attorney general's office said in December it suspected drug gangs who wanted to show their power were behind his abduction. The sprawling Gulf cartel and its feared "Zetas" wing of hit men run drugs through the area into Texas.
Batista, based in Miami, had been invited to Coahuila by state police to give seminars on security as the death toll in Mexico's drug war soared to 6,000 people last year. Kidnappings are on the rise across Mexico.
He apparently broke with caution by stepping outside a restaurant alone after answering a cell phone call. Police are unsure whether he was hauled into a waiting car or went willingly in a vehicle sent for him.
Batista is one of more than a dozen U.S. residents kidnapped in Mexico since October, mostly in the violent city of Tijuana, according to the FBI.
(Editing by Mohammad Zargham) |
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