Mexico Murders Probe Intensifies
MEXICO CITY (AP) - President Vicente Fox has ordered federal crime specialists to take over the investigation into the killings of 67 women in the past eight years in Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas.
In a statement released Wednesday, the president said federal investigators will work closely with authorities in northern Chihuahua state, but his government wasn't satisfied with the progress of the 8-year-old local investigation.
The attorney general's office said Thursday that newly appointed federal investigators plan to ask FBI officials in Texas to cooperate with the Juarez investigation.
U.S. investigators were called in to help with the case in past years, but dropped their inquiries after disagreements with the Chihuahua police, said attorney general spokeswoman Mariana Dauvila.
``The president is looking for concrete results in the shortest amount of time possible,'' Dauvila said. ``His feeling is that organized-crime authorities in Mexico City are best equipped for this investigation. They are also best equipped to cooperate with the FBI.''
The FBI office in El Paso did not return several phone calls from The Associated Press.
This year, the bodies of 10 women were discovered - eight of them, partially clad and badly bruised, were found Nov. 6 and 7 in an industrial section of this border city of 1.3 million. Police have arrested two Juarez bus drivers in eight of the killings.
From 1993 to 1999, police found the bodies of 57 other women in the desert surrounding Juarez.
Many of the victims had come from poor towns in the Mexican countryside to work at the city's mostly U.S.-owned factories. Most were young and all had been strangled and apparently raped.
The killings were so similar that investigators considered them the work of a serial killer.
In March 1999, five bus drivers were convicted in 20 of the 57 previous murders, and police thought they had solved the case. The five are in prison.
But Fox said that too many unanswered questions remain, and Chihuahua Governor Patricio Martinez needed to allow the attorney general's office to be in charge of the rest of the investigation.
Copyright 2001 Guardian Unlimited