TLALMANALCO, Mexico (AP) - Mexican authorities said Thursday that they have found a mass grave east of Mexico City and are testing to determine if it holds some of the 12 people who vanished from a bar in an upscale area of the capital nearly three months ago.
At least seven corpses had been recovered from the grave in Tlalmanalco, Mexico City prosecutor Rodolfo Rios told reporters at a news conference. He said the victims could not be identified from clothing, and the cause of death had not been determined.
"We will look at DNA tests that have been taken ... to confirm or discard scientifically if the bodies found are the people who disappeared from the bar," Rios said.
The federal Attorney General's Office said agents had been investigating weapons trafficking, not the mass kidnapping, when they discovered the grave. Rios said authorities were investigating who owns the property.
"They found a home that looked like a safe house," Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam told reporters. "We were operating under the belief it was a weapons case."
The young bar-goers vanished from the after-hours Heaven club at midday May 26, just a block from Mexico City's leafy Paseo de Reforma, the capital's equivalent of the Champs-Elysees.
About 10 relatives of the missing marched into the news conference before it began to demand that they be informed first of what was going on. The families have criticized authorities for the lack of leads or explanation of what has happened in the weeks since their loved ones disappeared.
Later, some of the relatives showed up on the property being excavated, crying and covering their faces from the media.
"We have had three months with this anxiety," said Maria Teresa Ramos, grandmother of Jerzy Ortiz, one of the missing. "We are dying every day, little by little."
Rio said there were more bodies and the work would continue in an area near Rancho La Mesa Ecological Park in the state of Mexico. He said the excavation was difficult because of terrain and rainy weather that has made the ground muddy.
Authorities kept more than a mile perimeter around the excavation site on a hilly ranch, where federal police and attorney general's trucks and large white vans could be seen.
The land is private property, said a worker on a neighboring property who would not allow his name to be used. The ranch is walled and surrounded by oak and pine trees. Bulldozers could be heard off in the distance, as well as cows, rooster and other animals. The worker said it cannot be accessed by the public.
Prosecutors have said the abductions from the bar were linked to a dispute between two rival drug gangs, one in Mexico City's dangerous Tepito neighborhood, home to most of the abducted. The families of the disappeared, however, say the missing young people were not involved in drug trafficking.