EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – Mexican authorities have pulled several bodies from a clandestine grave less than a mile from the U.S. border at San Elizario, Texas. It’s in the same neighborhood where they located the remains of eight homicide victims last September.
“We have found six bodies so far,” Chihuahua Deputy Attorney General Carlos Manuel Salas told a KTSM/Border Report camera crew. “We have conducted intensive searches for the past three to four weeks related to information we received about (Martin Gallegos). We have found several bodies, and we will keep looking.”
Gallegos, a.k.a. “El Pitufo” (The Smurf), is an alleged leader of the Mexicles drug gang. He was featured in the binational Se Busca Informacion border’s most-wanted criminals public information campaign last year and arrested on Dec. 31 in Torreon, Mexico.
A banner hung from an overpass last month accused Gallegos of clandestinely burying 30 bodies in a home in north Juarez. Police searched several homes in the area for days and located five cadavers.
The latest dig took place Wednesday many miles southeast, in the Portal del Valle neighborhood featured in Border Report’s Dec. 3 special report “Cartels: Death, Denial and a Region Under Siege.”
Salas said police relied on a canine trained to sniff out cadavers and the expertise of Chihuahua forensic experts to find the latest illegal grave. Three of the cadavers had been buried for a long time because they were reduced to skeletal remains, he said.
Juarez so far this year has recorded 230 confirmed and suspected homicides – an average of 3.4 per day.
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