Mexican gang 'killed women for organs'

Some of the dozens of Mexican women killed during a decade of unsolved murders in the city of Ciudad Juarez may have been kidnapped and killed by a gang that harvested and sold their organs.

The attorney general's office said "several details" suggested that 14 of the 88 women whose decomposed remains have been found in the city near the American border may have been killed for this reason. For many years the deaths have been treated as rape-murders.

"We're not saying this is the only line of investigation, but this is a probable one among many," said Vega Memije, a spokesman. The implication, though prosecutors did not state the theory in detail, is that the organs would be sold to wealthy Americans.

Oscar Maynez, a former head of the Ciudad Juarez forensics office, who worked on the case until 2001, said: "Who would have enough money to buy organs? According to this theory, Americans. But in fact, transferring organs in the United States requires a lot of infrastructure, expertise and paperwork, and they haven't presented any evidence of that."

Mr Maynez said he saw no evidence of missing organs in bodies found during his tenure. Many of the remains were just skeletons, making it hard to test the theory.

But Mr Memije said the evidence was strong enough to justify a house-arrest order against two suspects, an iron worker and a T-shirt vendor, detained last month on suspicion of killing three of eight women whose bodies were found on disused land in 2001. A cell phone belonging to a victim was allegedly linked to the T-shirt seller.(AP)