MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - A group of 19 passengers kidnapped from a bus in northern Mexico last week may be migrants, a state government official said on Monday.
Last Thursday, a bus was travelling in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas when it was intercepted by a group of armed men, who forced the victims off the bus, letting the rest of the passengers go unharmed.
Mexican authorities have not been contacted by any family members of the missing, suggesting they may be migrants, state security spokesman Luis Alberto Rodriguez said in an interview.
"There are no complaints, there are no relatives who are filing claims for the people who are missing," he said.
Tamaulipas has for years suffered high levels of murders and disappearances amid clashes between violent criminal gangs.
In August 2010, 72 undocumented migrants from Central and South America were murdered by the Zetas gang at a ranch in Tamaulipas. A year later, nearly 200 corpses, many of them Mexican, were found in mass graves in the area.
(Reporting by Lizbeth Diaz and Noe Torres; writing by Julia Love, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien)