The skeletal remains discovered in an alleged clandestine grave in southeastern Mexico City are those of animals, not humans, prosecutors said Wednesday.
“The 14 bone elements found at the site are of animal origin, particularly of the canine species, and none of them correspond to any person,” Mexico City prosecutor Ulises Lara said in a statement.
Cecilia Flores, who leads the Searching Mothers group in the state of Sonora, posted on social media Tuesday the discovery of the remains buried in a vacant lot, something fairly rare in the Mexican capital.
She said the group also found photographs and identification belonging to different people, which were believed to have possibly been the victims’.
However, as of midday Wednesday, a woman and a child who some of the documents belonged to were found alive, the first having lost her ID in a robbery and the child having left his in a book that was discarded.
The site, according to the search group, was on the border between Iztapalapa and Tlahuac, two crowded boroughs in the capital with high rates of poverty and gang crime.
Lara, the prosecutor, also said that with a town located nearby, it would be difficult to cremate bodies — a process that requires high temperatures for a long time — without the townspeople realizing it.
“We can categorically affirm that it is neither a crematorium nor a clandestine grave,” he said.
More than 100,000 people have gone missing in Mexico, mostly since the government of then-president Felipe Calderon deployed the military to fight drug cartels in 2006.
