| | |  News Around the Republic of Mexico | August 2008 
Sisters' Severed Heads Found on Street
 Agence France-Presse
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| | Pink wooden crosses stand in the place where the corpses of eight murdered women were found in 2001 in Ciudad Juarez, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. (AFP/Alfredo Estrella) | | |
Mexico City - The severed heads of two sisters have been discovered dumped on a path in Mexico's northern Durango state, the local prosecutor's office says, making a total of 18 decapitations countrywide in the past three days.
Saturday's discovery came as Mexicans began mass protests against escalating violence, with some 2700 deaths in gangland-style killings reported so far this year, according to national media.
Drug cartels often use decapitations to send messages to their rivals.
The sisters' heads lay on a path in Durango city outskirts some 500m from the local prosecutor's office, while the bodies were discovered several hours later in another area of the state capital.
"They were two women aged 33 and 42," a spokesman said, adding that they had been half-sisters.
Between January and mid-August this year, 115 murders were committed in Durango, the fourth worst murder rate in the country, according to a recent tally by El Universal daily.
Meanwhile, the headless bodies of 12 men - whom officials said were linked to organised crime - were found on Thursday in Yucatan state in eastern Mexico.
Three heads were also found yesterday in the northern state of Sonora and another one in northern Chihuahua, where almost 1000 killings have been reported this year.
Violence has risen throughout Mexico since President Felipe Calderon, who took office at the end of 2006, launched a crackdown on drug trafficking and related attacks that included the deployment of more than 36,000 soldiers across the country. |
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