Mexico investigating female vigilante ‘bus driver hunter’
Forensic personnel work a crime scene in which a bus driver and his two assistants were killed by gunmen inside a bus in Acapulco’s Cayaco neighborhood, in the state of Guerrero, Mexico, on March 11, 2013.
Mexican prosecutors said Monday they were investigating claims that a female vigilante who calls herself "Diana the huntress" killed two bus drivers in the city of Ciudad Juarez last week.
In an unverified email, the "bus driver hunter" told various news outlets the murders were retaliation for drivers' sexual abuse of women on a nightly route that takes many workers across the US border to assembly plants in El Paso, Texas.
“I myself and other women have suffered in silence but we can’t stay quiet anymore,” the email said, according to The Associated Press. “I am the instrument of vengeance for several women.”
Chihuahua state prosecutors office spokesman Arturo Sandoval said authorities are considering revenge as a possible motive, especially since no money or other valuables appear to have been taken from the two victims.
“Now that we have the email in the case file, it indicates that this could have been someone who had had a run-in with a driver of one of his relatives,” Sandoval said.
The crimes allegedly began Wednesday last week, when a woman with blond hair, possibly a wig or dyed, boarded a bus and shot the driver in the head. The next day, it appears the same woman got on another bus and shot dead another driver.
A witness of the second shooting said the killer told the driver, "You guys think you're real bad, don't you?" before pulling the trigger, according to reports by the newspaper Diario de Juarez cited by the AP.
In an effort to prevent more killings, the local authorities said they are placing undercover cops on buses to conduct weapons searches.
Lucha Castro, who runs the Chihuahua Women's Human Rights Center, told the AP that it's possible the bus hunter "or someone close to her suffered some abuse by one of these guys."
"It's a fact that there are sexual abuse cases on the bus routes, but it's no greater than women disappearing from the streets in downtown, in human trafficking rings," she added.
In the 1990s and early 2000s more than 100 women went missing in Ciudad Juarez. Sometimes their raped, dead bodies were discovered weeks later. A number of bus drivers were arrested in relation to those murders.