New York Times – 9/20/2018
MEXICO CITY — A wandering refrigerated truck carrying corpses from an overflowing morgue in Mexico actually contained 273 bodies, not 157 as originally stated.
Officials described late Wednesday how the truck was forced to move around the outskirts of the western city of Guadalajara as neighbors and officials objected to its grisly cargo, and the smell.
A total of 444 bodies had piled up at the state morgue, as Mexico suffered a 17 percent surge in homicides so far this year. Forty-nine of those bodies remained in the morgue, 273 were crammed onto the truck and 122 were kept in a second refrigerated trailer in the morgue parking lot.
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Mexican troops and police committed two extrajudicial killings while confronting presumed fuel thieves in the central state of Puebla in May 2017, a Mexican human rights group said on Wednesday, adding to allegations of abuse against the military.
Mexican authorities said on Wednesday they had fired the top prosecutor in Jalisco state, the second official to lose his job after the discovery of a container truck holding the bodies of hundreds of victims of the country’s drug war.
The governor of the western Mexico state of Jalisco has fired the director of the state morgue after a refrigerated truck carrying 157 unidentified bodies drew complaints from neighbors over the smell.
Authorities in western Mexico swamped by mounting murders from the country’s drug war have resorted to storing dozens of corpses in a refrigerated container truck that in recent days has been parked in several towns, angering residents.