A mob in the Mexican city of Taxco on Thursday beat a woman to death because she was suspected of kidnapping and killing a young girl, rampaging just hours before the city’s Holy Week procession.
The mob formed after an eight-year-old girl disappeared on Wednesday. Her body was found on a road on the outskirts of the city early on Thursday. Security camera footage appeared to show a woman and a man loading a bundle, which might have been the girl’s body, into a taxi.
The mob surrounded the woman’s house, threatening to drag her out. Police took the woman into the bed of a police pickup truck, but then stood by — apparently intimidated by the crowd — 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.
Photo: AP
Police then picked her up and took her away, leaving the pavement stained with blood.
The Guerrero State prosecutors’ office later confirmed that the woman died of her injuries.
“This is the result of the bad government we have,” said a member of the mob, who gave her name as Andrea, but refused to give her last name.
Photo: AP
“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 eight-year-old girl.”
Taxco Mayor Mario Figueroa said he shared residents’ outrage over the mob’s actions.
Figueroa said that three people beaten by the mob — the woman and two men — had been taken away by police.
Video from the scene suggested they had also been beaten, although The Associated Press witnessed only the beating of the woman.
The prosecutors’ office said the two men were hospitalized.
There was no immediate information on their condition.
In a statement issued soon after the event, Figueroa said that 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 on Thursday night.
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.”
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