Four Americans who traveled to Mexico last week to seek health care were arrested in a deadly shooting and abducted by heavily armed men and dumped in the back of a pickup truck. load, officials from both countries said Monday.
The four traveled Friday in a white minivan with North Carolina license plates. They were shot shortly after entering the Mexican city of Matamoros from Brownsville, Texas, the FBI said in a statement Sunday.
“All four Americans were loaded into a vehicle and removed from the scene by armed persons,” the FBI said. The office is offering a $50,000 reward for their return and arrest of the kidnappers.
Zalandria Brown of Florence, SC, said she contacted the FBI and local officials after learning her younger brother, Zindell Brown, was one of the four victims.
“This is like a bad dream that you wish you could wake up from,” she said in a phone interview. “Watching a member of your family get thrown in the back of a truck and get dragged, it’s unbelievable.”
Ms. Brown said her brother, who lives in Myrtle Beach, SC, and two friends were traveling with a third friend who was going to Mexico for gastric reduction surgery.
A video posted to social media on Friday shows men with assault rifles and body armor carrying four people to the bed of a white pickup truck in broad daylight. One was alive and sitting up, but the others appeared to be dead or injured. At least one person appeared to have raised his head from the sidewalk before being dragged onto the truck.
The scene illustrates the horrors that have raged for years in Matamoros, a city in the state of Tamaulipas that is dominated by factions of the powerful Gulf drug cartel, who often fight each other. . Amidst the violence, thousands of Mexicans have disappeared in Tamaulipas alone.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico said on Monday that “there was a confrontation between the groups and they were detained,” without providing details. He initially said four Americans had gone to Mexico to buy drugs.
The chief prosecutor in Tamaulipas, Irving Barrios, told reporters that a Mexican woman died in Friday’s shooting.
Friday’s shootings in Matamoros were so bad that the US Consulate issued a warning about the danger and local authorities warned residents to shelter in place.
