Mexico officials identify bodies in mass grave

Mexican authorities found a mass grave Thursday containing the remains of five youths who were among a group of 12 people abducted from a Mexico City club near the U.S. embassy in May, a crime that sparked fears of increasing drug gang violence in the capital.

Assistant attorney general Renato Sales told reporters that 13 badly decomposed bodies have been pulled from the grave covered with cement, quicklime and asbestos 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. There was no immediate explanation about how the 13th body was related to the kidnapped youths.

"They're going to wind up identifying all of them," Martinez told The Associated Press. "I hope the SEIDO [the federal attorney general's office for organized crime] takes over the case, because now it's proven that this is organized crime."

The Mexican capital has been largely free of the gang-related violence that has killed close to 80,000 people since 2007.

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.

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 drug 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.

The federal Attorney General's Office said agents had received information about possible illegal weapons on a private property next to Rancho La Mesa Ecological Park 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."

Al Jazeera and wire services