Mexico City, Feb 10 (EFE).- Members of the prestigious Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, or EAAF, will meet with relatives of the five youths who went missing last month in the Mexican Gulf coast state of Veracruz and determine whether to investigate the case.
That announcement comes after the discovery at a ranch of human remains that authorities say correspond to two of the victims.
The purpose of the meeting, scheduled for this week, is to review the conditions of the case and decide whether or not to intervene, EAAF member Miguel Nieva told Radio Formula.
"We don't want to commit ourselves to something we can't deliver," he said, recalling that that scientific non-profit organization was already applying its expertise to several cases in Mexico - including the mass kidnapping and presumed deaths of 43 male students from a rural teachers college in the southern state of Guerrero - as well as in other countries.
Bernardo Benitez Herrera, the father of one of the five youths who disappeared on Jan. 11 in the municipality of Tierra Blanca, said he had contacted the Argentine team on Tuesday night and that the meeting would probably take place on Wednesday.
He told Radio Formula that the Veracruz state Attorney General's Office had wanted to deliver his son's remains to him along with a death certificate.
"I didn't accept," Benitez Herrera said, adding that he wanted "100 percent" proof the remains found on Monday were those of his son.
The bone fragments were returned to Mexico City, where they are being guarded by the Gendarmerie, an elite division of Mexico's Federal Police.
Unconvinced by the genetic testing carried out by the Mexican Attorney General's Office, he said he wanted a second and even a third DNA exam on the remains found at the El Limon ranch outside the town of Tlalixcoyan.
The deputy secretary of human rights for Mexico's Government Secretariat, Roberto Campa, said DNA tests showed a 100 percent match between human remains - burned bone fragments and two traces of blood - and the parents of Bernardo Benitez Arroniz and Alfredo Gonzalez Diaz, two of the missing young men.
Referring to the other three missing individuals, including a 16-year-old girl, Campa said investigators were continuing their search for more remains but also trying to locate them alive.
The five young people were arrested by state police at a gas station in Tierra Blanca, a municipality in central Veracruz, and handed over to a drug cartel for unknown reasons, according to the official investigation.
Seven law enforcement agents are under arrest in connection with the disappearances, including Tierra Blanca police chief Marcos Conde Hernandez and Francisco Navarrete Serna, a suspected boss of the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion in that municipality.