Mob In Mexico 'Stomps, Kicks And Pummels' Suspected Kidnapper To Death

A mob in the Mexican city of Taxco beat a woman to death on Thursday because she was suspected of killing a young girl. The mob formed after an 8-year-old girl disappeared Wednesday. Her body was found on a road on the outskirts of the city early Thursday, The Associated Press reported.

Security camera footage appeared to show a woman and a man loading a bundle, which may have been the girl’s body, into a taxi, the report said. The mob surrounded the woman’s house Thursday, threatening to drag her out. Police took the woman into the bed of a police pickup truck, but then stood by, as members of the mob dragged her out of the truck and down onto the street where “they stomped, kicked and pummeled her until she lay, partly stripped and motionless.”

Police then picked her up and took her away, leaving the pavement stained with blood. “This is the result of the bad government we have,” said a member of the mob. “This isn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened,” she said, referring to the murder of the girl, “but this is the first time the people have done something.” “We are fed up,” she said. “This time it was an 8-year-old girl.”

The mayor of Taxco, Mario Figueroa, said he shared residents’ outrage over the killing. Figueroa said the mob thrashed a total of three people. Video from the scene suggested they had also been beaten, though AP witnessed only the beating of the woman. The state prosecutors’ office said the two men were hospitalized. There was no immediate information on their condition.

In a statement, Figueroa complained he did not get any help from the state government for his small, outnumbered municipal police force. “Unfortunately, up to now we have not received any help or answers,” Figueroa said. The Good Friday eve religious procession, which dates back centuries in the old silver-mining town, went off as planned Thursday night.

People crowded Taxco’s colonial streets to watch hooded men walking while whipping themselves or carrying heavy bundles of thorns across their bare shoulders in penitence to emulate the suffering of Jesus Christ carrying the cross. But the earlier flash of violence cast a pall over the already solemn procession, which draws thousands to the small town.

Many participants wore small white ribbons of mourning. “I never thought that in a touristic place like Taxco we would experience a lynching,” said Felipa Lagunas, a local elementary school teacher. “I saw it as something distant, in places far from civilization … I never imagined that my community would experience this on such a special day.”

Residents said they have had enough, even though the violence may further affect tourism. “We know the town lives off of Holy Week (tourism) and that this is going to mess it up. There will be a lot of people who won’t want to come anymore,” said Andrea, the woman who was in the mob. “We make our living off tourism, but we cannot continue to allow them to do these things to us.”

(With agency inputs)