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Mexico Confirms Burnt Remains are Missing Australian Surfers


FILE - Surfers walk along a closed beach ahead of Hurricane Blanca in Mazatlan, state of Sinaloa, Mexico.
FILE - Surfers walk along a closed beach ahead of Hurricane Blanca in Mazatlan, state of Sinaloa, Mexico.

A Mexican official on Monday identified charred bodies found in a camper van as two Australian surfers missing since last month in a state infamous for narcotics gangs.

A burnt-out van belonging to one of the Australians was found in the northwestern state of Sinaloa in late November with two charred corpses inside. Officials ran DNA tests to identify them.

The Sinaloa state attorney general, Marco Antonio Higuera, confirmed through a spokesman that all results showed the corpses were of the missing men, Dean Lucas and Adam Coleman.

The state was still waiting for official paperwork in order to finish the process, the spokesman said.

Sinaloa officials this month arrested three men over the disappearance, but said two suspects remain at large.

Lucas and Coleman, who were in Mexico surfing, were due to travel to the western city of Guadalajara on November 21 but did not arrive, according to a message posted on social media site Facebook.

The abandoned van was found near the Pacific coast in Sinaloa, about 200 kilometers south of where they were last seen and some 716 kilometers north of Guadalajara.

It was unclear why the two men had strayed off course, or why they would be targeted.

Sinaloa is notorious in Mexico as the heartland of some of the country's most powerful and dangerous drug cartels.

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    Reuters

    Reuters is a news agency founded in 1851 and owned by the Thomson Reuters Corporation based in Toronto, Canada. One of the world's largest wire services, it provides financial news as well as international coverage in over 16 languages to more than 1000 newspapers and 750 broadcasters around the globe.

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