Horrific moment Mexican cartel goon in SKELETON mask leads six innocent boys aged between 14 and 18 to their deaths – before sending victims’ parents the warped clip
Parents of six teenagers murdered by the Mexican cartel were sent brutal video footage of a gangster leading the boys to their deaths wearing a disturbing skeleton mask.
Six boys aged between 14 and 18 were slaughtered on Wednesday at a remote farm in Zacatecas, Mexico, after being kidnapped three days earlier.
The teenagers’ grieving parents have released the disturbing ransom images sent to the media by their children’s killer after Mexican authorities denied the victims had been kidnapped.
In the video – filmed by a gangster wearing a terrifying skeleton mask to cover his face – the seven boys follow their killer up a hill in what appears to be the middle of nowhere in the state of Zacatecas in central Mexico.
They are all blindfolded, barefoot, wearing black hoodies and with their hands tied behind their backs as they helplessly follow the tracks of their captor.
A Mexican cartel member wearing a bizarre skeleton mask filmed himself leading six teenage boys to their gruesome deaths
The six boys, aged between 14 and 18, have been found and identified. There was a seventh boy who was kidnapped and who survived, but is unconscious in the hospital
The disturbing video footage was shared with the families of the young boys in an extortion attempt by the gang members
The victims have been identified as: Diego Rodríguez, 17; Jorge Ocon, 14 and his cousin Héctor Salcedo, 14; Gumaro Santacruz, 18; Oscar Rojas, 15; and Jesús Rodríguez, 18.
One teenager, identified as Sergio Acevedo, 18, survived the horrific attack but suffered a head and nose wound and was rushed to hospital where he is being guarded by police, the Zacatecas Attorney General’s office said Wednesday afternoon .
In the video, the cartel member leading the group of teens appears armed and is joined by fellow gang members who chase the boys with more weapons.
The video was shown on local news channel Milenio TV as the distraught parents of the dead teenagers were desperate to refute Mexican officials’ claims that their children had not been kidnapped.
Audio from the video shows a ‘narcocorrido’ – a song about the life of criminals in Mexico – playing as the barbaric cartel members viciously take the boys away to be slaughtered. The lyrics of the song say ‘death is in their eyes’.
The video was allegedly sent in an attempt to blackmail the families by tormenting them with the cruel images.
The kidnapping took place when the boys, who were all friends and cousins, were all on a weekend getaway near the town of Malapso with their families. During the journey, a group of armed men suddenly entered the premises and fired gunshots into the air.
The group of gangsters took all the teens while they were still barefoot and then led them down the hill and filmed the scary video that they then used in an extortion attempt.
The family members shared the video with Mexican media as officials claimed their children had not actually been kidnapped
Relatives carried the coffin of teenager Diego Rodriguez Vidales, one of six boys found dead at the remote farm
The boys were found just three days after they were abducted from the spot where they were enjoying a family weekend away
The terrifying kidnapping took place in Zacatecas in central Mexico, an area where rival criminal gangs regularly clash over lucrative smuggling routes.
Zacatecas is one of Mexico’s most violent states, where rival criminal gangs regularly clash over lucrative smuggling routes. According to government data, more than 500 people were murdered in the first eight months of this year
According to Governor David Monreal, kidnappings are apparently a strategy used by cartels in their turf wars with rivals, ensuring that victims are released if they find they are not being targeted.
“It’s a kind of modus operandi, sometimes like a dispute over territory, where those from one cartel overpower another cartel,” he said.
The incident is the latest tragic outcome in the wake of this year’s mass kidnappings of youth.
In August, a gruesome video circulated on social media showing the final moments of five young men kidnapped in the neighboring state of Jalisco.
In the video you see a pair of tied up, inert bodies lying in the foreground. A young person who saw another victim bludgeoned and apparently beheaded turns out to be the fourth member of the kidnapped group of friends.
At the height of the Mexican drug cartel’s brutality in the 2010s, gangs sometimes forced kidnapping victims to kill each other. In 2010, a Mexican cartel kidnapped men from passenger buses and forced them to fight each other to death with sledgehammers.