Body of Kidnapped Mexican Prosecutor Found

The body of a federal prosecutor kidnapped last week in the northern Mexican state of Durango has been found, officials said.

Claudia Avila Yañez’ body was discovered in a marble workshop in Villa Juarez, a community near the city of Lerdo.

The prosecutor was shot several times in the abdomen and extremities, the Durango state Attorney General’s Office said.

Avila Yañez was in charge of handling criminal cases in Gomez Palacio, a city near the site where her body was found.

Gomez Palacio and Villa Juarez are both in the Comarca Lagunera, an area where drug traffickers have expanded their operations in recent years.

Avila Yañez and two colleagues were ambushed Thursday night while traveling in an official vehicle, a spokesman for the Durango bureau of the federal Attorney General’s Office said.

The assailants kidnapped Avila Yañez and Gilberto Barajas, who has not been found, after killing Gustavo Armando Garcia Silva, the head of the AG’s Durango bureau, officials said.

The AG’s office expressed its condolences to Avila Yañez’s family and vowed to find those responsible for her murder.

Avila Yañez had only been on the job at the Durango bureau about a week and had not reported receiving any threats, an AG’s office spokesman said.

Durango is in the “Golden Triangle,” a region that also includes Sinaloa state, the birthplace of Mexico’s most powerful drug lords, and Chihuahua, the country’s most violent state.

Law enforcement professionals are among the 35,000 people killed in Mexico since December 2006 amid a brutal conflict pitting rival drug cartels against each other and the security forces.