22 bus passengers kidnapped in Mexico might be migrants

Armed men

intercepted a bus on March 7, where they kidnapped 22 passengers in the San Fernando-Reynosa highway . A government official said those kidnapped might be migrants .

The ministerial police said that the bus driver explained that the bus departed from Tampico and then two trucks blocked the road and that other trucks parked next to the bus.

The armed men kidnapped the passengers and left. The passengers were on their way to Reynosa and the gunmen let the rest of the passengers go unharmed.

Authorities have not been contacted by any family members of the missing , suggesting they may be migrants , state security spokesman Luis Alberto Rodríguez said.

“There are no complaints, there are no relatives who are filing claims for the people who are missing ,” he said.

Rodríguez said later that following investigations, authorities had registered 22 people missing , three more than previously reported .

On Monday, the bus company, Grupo Transpaís , confirmed the incident through a statement released on Facebook .

“The event was immediately reported to the authorities and according to the required procedures,” reads the statement.

The company has been in the business for 88 years and transports around 8 million people each year.

This case is similar to one that took place in August 2010, whe n 72 undocumented migrants from Central and South America were murdered by the Zetas cartel at a ranch in Tamaulipas . A year later, nearly 200 corpses , many of them Mexican, were found in mass graves in the area.

Migrants, not criminals

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