Kidnapped journalist found dead in Mexico, sixth killed in 2017

MEXICO CITY: Police in Mexico found the burned remains of a journalist who was kidnapped in May, the sixth reporter killed this year in the country, a state prosecutor said Monday.

With the grisly find, Salvador Adame, the head of a local TV station in the state of Michoacan, becomes the latest name on the list of more than 100 journalists killed in Mexico since 2000.

More than 90 per cent of these killings remain unpunished.

Adame, 44, was surrounded by gunmen and abducted in the western town of Nueva Italia on May 18.

Police and soldiers found his charred remains four weeks later, dumped at a spot known as ‘Devil’s Gully’ along a local road, said state prosecutor Jose Martin Godoy.

“DNA samples have confirmed that these remains are those of Salvador Adame,” Godoy told a news conference.

Adame was the owner of local television channel Canal 6 in Michoacan, a region hit hard by Mexico’s epidemic of gang violence.

His kidnapping came two days after Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto had vowed to strengthen protections for journalists and prosecute those who attack them.

That announcement was in response to the killing of awardwinning crime reporter Javier Valdez in the northwestern state of Sinaloa on May 15.

All six journalists killed this year had been reporting on powerful crime gangs and government corruption.

Adame had been investigating a gas station he suspected to be a front for organised crime, in collusion with the authorities, a colleague said on condition of anonymity.

But investigators have not cited his journalism as a possible motive for his killing – drawing criticism from media rights groups.

State prosecutors initially theorised he was indebted or involved in a love triangle.

Godoy said investigators were informed of the location of his body by a recently-arrested suspect.

The suspect was said to have indicated that Adame was killed on the orders of a regional crime boss known as ‘El Chano Pena’.

Investigators were honing in on the “possible motive (of) problems of a personal nature between the victim and El Chano Pena,” Godoy said.

Watchdog group Reporters Without Borders condemned what it called a failure to investigate Adame’s reporting as a motive. — AFP