TORTURE EVIDENCE AT MEXICO GRAVE

FBI informants and other enemies of a notorious drug cartel may have been
tortured in a remote cave before being killed on a shooting range used as a
cover for mass murder.

As the number of suspected "drug cemeteries" along the Mexico-Texas border
rose to four yesterday, investigators concentrated on one ranch which had
yielded the first two bodies.

"The first things we have uncovered are bones belonging to two people,"
Jorge Madrazo, the Mexican Attorney-General, said. "We're not at the end of
this operation, we are just at the beginning." It was reported later that
investigators had found five bodies piled on top of each other.

The Mexican authorities believe that as many as 100 of the so-called
"disappeared" could lie under the four killing fields across the Chihuahua
region.

"Welcome to the Paso del Norte Gun Club," a faded sign proclaims at a ranch
a few miles south of the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez, which has
become the initial focus for forensic teams. They fear that their
painstaking excavation of the scrubby desert site will reveal just how
extensive was its use for something other than Sunday afternoon leisure
shooting. The investigators have also discovered a cave and "suggestions
that people had been tortured inside", according to CBS news, which broke
the story of the suspected mass graves.

US officials are refusing to disclose details of the grim investigation, but
they were playing down earlier reports that 22 Americans were among the dead
and said that only about four or five US citizens were thought to be missing
in the region. The FBI also denied that any of its agents or Drug
Enforcement Agency operatives were missing.

However, Raymond Kelly, of the US customs service, said that he had been
unable to locate some of his informers in the area and that the FBI was
working on the basis that informers could be buried at the site. Jose
Larrieta Carrasco, director of Mexico's organised crime unit, said he had
"very concrete information as to these sites".

The tip-off came from a former Mexican policeman, who admitted complicity in
killings by the Juarez drug cartel, which controls billions of dollars worth
of smuggling across the border into the United States. The "disappeared"
from both sides of the border are believed to have either been involved in
drug smuggling and fell foul of the gangs or tried to help law enforcement
officers. There are so many people who have vanished that the area has its
own organisation for their relatives - The Association of Relatives of
Disappeared Persons - which has compiled a list of 196 missing.

Claudia Sanchez, 21, whose father, who invented a listening device for the
Mexican Government, disappeared with her mother on the way to a cinema in
May 1994, is among those who have been asked to supply dental records.
"Maybe if it's them, I have a place where I can go and put flowers," she
said.

Although the FBI is being careful to defer in public to the Mexican federal
authorities, it appears that its forensic teams are taking the lead, using
ground-piercing radar and mapping out the sites in grids.

The local Mexican police have expressed anger that they have been ignored by
the Mexican Government and FBI. The reason, however, was simple; someone
would almost certainly have tipped off one of the eight people now in
custody for the killings.