13 bodies found in house in northern Mexican state

By MARK STEVENSON
April 15, 11:15 PM

MEXICO CITY — Ten complete bodies, three headless bodies and four severed heads were found when authorities dug up a pit in a house in the Mexican state of Durango, authorities said Friday.

Authorities are determining whether some of the heads belonged to the bodies. The badly decayed corpses — which have not yet been identified — were taken to a morgue for autopsies, the Durango state prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

Durango has been the scene of a bloody turf battle between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Zetas gang. The grisly discovery comes as mass graves with dozens of bodies have been discovered in the northern state of Tamaulipas, where the Zetas are fighting the Gulf Cartel.

Also Friday, Mexico’s army announced that it had captured a man who allegedly confessed to participating in the killing of a well-known poet’s son and six other people.

The March 28 slaying of Juan Francisco Sicilia, the son of poet Javier Sicilia, sparked demonstrations throughout the country against the violence of Mexico’s drug war, which has claimed more than 34,000 lives.

But the circumstances of the arrest in the high-profile case immediately drew suspicions.

The army said suspect Rodrigo Elizalde Mora was captured Thursday in the central city of Cuernavaca, where the killings occurred.

He confessed to working for the South Pacific Cartel, led by reputed drug lord Hector Beltran Leyva, and to helping kill Sicilia and a group of friends, according to the army statement.

But Elizalde Mora appeared before reporters badly beaten, and said he had been kidnapped by four unidentified men in a sport utility vehicle, who then apparently turned him over to authorities.

“They picked me up and they beat me,â€