EL PASO, Texas, Nov. 8 (UPI) -- Mexican authorities worried Thursday that serial killers are still operating in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, after eight more bodies of young women were discovered dumped in the border city across the Rio Grande from El Paso.
Teams of police officers and police cadets were expected to continue searching near a drainage ditch in the city. The remains of three women were found Tuesday in a cotton field and the bodies of five more women were found Wednesday in the city.
"These deaths will not remain unpunished," Chihuahua state Attorney General Gonzalez Rascon told the El Paso Times. "The killer or killers will be tried to the fullest extent of the law."
Fifty-seven women, many of them maquiladora workers, have been slain in Juarez since 1993. Maquiladoras are foreign-owned manufacturing plants that hire thousands of Mexican workers. Some of the bodies found Wednesday were near the Association of Maquiladoras office.
In 1999, five bus drivers were charged in 20 of the slayings and Mexican officials insisted that the serial slayings had ended.
Chihuahua state police said the victims found Tuesday were apparently killed weeks or months apart and the bodies buried later in the city.
In February, Lilia Alejandra Garcia, 17, who worked at a plant in Juarez, was found dead near the factory several days after she was reported missing. Witnesses told investigators they saw a group of men in a vehicle abduct her after she left work but no one was arrested.
Claudia Ivette Gonzalez, 20, has been missing since Oct. 10 and police have not been able to confirm that her remains were among those found this week.
"The authorities told us they would help find her when we reported her missing, but they never got back to us," her mother, Josefina Gonzalez, told the Times. "They told us they were investigating, but I don't know what to think anymore."
