MEXICO CITY (AP) — Prosecutors said Thursday that soldiers found two men who were kidnapped in June by a drug gang boss who is alleged to have gone on to kill two Jesuit priests and a tour guide.
One of the two brothers was dead when authorities found them in the mountains of the northern state of Chihuahua. The discovery raised the death toll in the bloody rampage blamed on the gang boss to four.
During an air and ground search in the remote mountains of the Sierra Tarahumara, troops found the pit where the gang buried one brother, Paul Berrelleza Rábago. They then found his brother, Jesús Armando, alive in the mountains.
Prosecutors said the dead brother had been shot, abducted along with his brother, and their house burned down at the start of a rampage by fugitive suspect José Noriel Portillo Gil, alias El “Chueco,” or “The Crooked One.”
Authorities have have said the rampage alledgedly started when a local baseball team that Portillo Gil sponsored lost a game to a team that included the two brothers. Portillo Gil allegedly attacked them on the following Monday in the town of Cerocahui.
He then allegedly abducted and beat a tourist guide who then sought refuge in the church facing the town’s central square. Two Jesuit priests, the Revs. Javier Campos, 79, and Joaquín Mora, 80, tried to protect the guide.
Portillo Gil allegedly killed all three, and took their bodies away in a pickup truck. The bodies were later found, but the suspect remains at large.
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