Mexico City police stumble on grisly butchering of 2 boys

MEXICO CITY — When Mexico City police stopped a man wheeling bundles down a street on a dolly, they stumbled on a grisly cargo — the hacked-up bodies of two adolescent boys who were apparently killed by people involved in street-level drug dealing.

The city’s prosecutors’ office said Wednesday that forensic examinations of the remains established that they were two boys of Indigenous background who had not been seen since Oct. 27 and were reported missing Oct. 29.

On Saturday, police stopped the man with the hand truck in the city’s colonial-era downtown. When they discovered severed limbs were in the bundles, they arrested him.

Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said that “it appears that it involved an issue of drug dealing,” but gave no further details. Neither she nor prosecutors gave the victims’ ages, but local media reported they were 12 and 14.

The boys lived in the same downtown area where their bodies were found, and they reportedly earned money selling candy in the street.

There was no immediate explanation of a possible motive in the killings. Drug and extortion gangs in Mexico City have reportedly recruited youths to work for them, but there was no immediate evidence that was involved in the case.

The Associated Press