Cartel footage released by Mexican cartel members on Tuesday shows five college students all kneeling next to each other. In that, a video was broadcasted over Mexican television showing the students being forced to murder each other.
Reports and images from the Daily Mail show the final moments of the lives of the students. One was forced to decapitate another who was his childhood friend before he was killed himself.
The students went missing last week on Friday and had been so prior to the video broadcast.
Footage shows the moments before their deaths, with the friends kneeling with their faces bloodied and duct tape over their mouths to keep them silent. The sign of the cartel also appears behind the students written on the wall.
The five victims were 21-year-old Jaime Adolfo Martínez Miranda, 22-year-old Dante Cedillo Hernández, 20-year-old Diego Alberto Lara Santoyo, 20-year-old Roberto Olmeda Cuellar, and Uriel Galván González who was the youngest at 19.
When authorities discovered remains in an abandoned home in Jalisco, Mexico on Wednesday, in what is believed to be the house in the video, four charred skulls were found. Another body was found in a burning car, confirmed to belong to one of the victims.
On Thursday, reports emerged that the five may have been lured away for the promise of work and were then kidnapped by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (JNGC).
David Saucedo Torres, a security analyst, told local reporters that they may have been recruited by call centers of the JNGC in an attempt to bring them into the cartel. They are given fake job offers, then once they are through the door, they are ordered to work for the cartel or be killed.
The five had been away at a fair in Lagos de Moreno and were on their way home when they were last seen.
A witness told a journalist from El Universal that 10 men had taken them from their car and put them in the back of a white pickup and a van with blacked-out windows.
The group was last heard of from a text sent by one of the students who told a relative they were on their way home.
