AFP - Mexican officials dismissed as "unsubstantiated" reports that as many as 100 Central American migrants were taken hostage during a raid on a train in southern Mexico.
El Salvador's foreign ministry said that around 50 migrants of various nationalities, mostly women, had been kidnapped during the attack in Mexico's southern state of Oaxaca.
The director of a Roman Catholic charity in Oaxaca state, citing witnesses, also mentioned a large number of hostages in the alleged attack late December 16.
But those two reports, as well as a report from a third charity, are "unsubstantiated," the Interior Ministry said in a statement.
"No evidence has been found confirming these reports," the statement read, adding that local and federal officials, as well as railroad management, had been contacted.
"Nor have there been any reports to Mexican authorities by migrants" about the alleged kidnapping, the statement added.
The reports said the migrants were abducted by an armed group that stopped a freight train they were traveling on as it entered Oaxaca state from the border state of Chiapas.
As many as 100 migrants were taken hostage in the raid, the director of a Catholic charity said Tuesday, citing witnesses.
"From the testimonies given to us, the train was carrying around 300 migrants," said Father Heyman Vasquez, who runs a refuge for migrants, most of whom are Central Americans heading north on top of trains in an attempt to enter the United States illegally.
Some 50 of the migrants fled and made their way to his refuge, located in the town of Arriaga, where the train trip began.
"Shortly before the raid, there was a police operation and they arrested 80 of them. Then the armed men came and kidnapped a large group of around 100 of them, mostly Hondurans, according to those who escaped," he told AFP.
The migrants said 10 well-armed men with machetes took the hostages away in trucks after the attack, according to Vasquez.
Their current whereabouts are unknown, but drug and human traffickers in Mexico have a history of capturing illegal migrants, forcing the women into prostitution and men into low-level criminal jobs, and occasionally simply robbing and killing them.
Migrants avoid Mexican police for fear of being detained and deported, which could explain why news of the kidnapping was slow to trickle out.
The rest of the migrants on the train scattered after the attack, and later arrived in small groups at shelters like Vasquez's set up along the route.
According to the Interior Ministry, the only time the train stopped was at a police checkpoint, where 92 of the migrants were detained.
Alejandro Solalinde, a priest in charge of another shelter that took in 19 migrants from the train, has since asked for government protection.
He said that last week gunmen from two powerful gangs -- the Zetas from Mexico and the Mara Salvatrucha, which operates in El Salvador and Central America -- demanded he give up the migrants, warning he would "face the consequences" if he refused.
In August the bodies of 72 abducted Central American migrants were found on a ranch in Mexico's northern Tamaulipas state, in what police said was a mass execution by the Zetas of men and women who refused to work for them.
Around half a million illegal migrants cross Mexico each year, mostly from Central America on their way to the US border, according to Mexico's Human Rights Commission.
Some 10,000 undocumented migrants were abducted in Mexico over six months from September 2008 to February 2009, the commission reported last year.
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