Two of the four Americans kidnapped at gunpoint in Mexico last week are dead and two are still alive, a Mexican state governor has said.
Four US citizens were kidnapped by armed men on 3 March while driving into the city of Matamoros in the north-eastern state of Tamaulipas, Mexico across the border from Texas.
They had traveled there for cosmetic surgery, relatives told US media.
US officials have yet to confirm the deaths.
Mexico’s attorney general’s office confirmed that of the four Americans, “two of them are dead, one person is injured and the other is alive,” the governor of Tamaulipas, Americo Villarreal, said during a news conference.
Both the Mexican and US federal governments have been investigating the kidnapping and searching for the four Americans.
A Mexican woman was killed in the incident last Friday.
The BBC’s US media partner CBS News reported the Americans were Latavia “Tay” McGee, Shaeed Woodard, Eric James Williams and Zindell Brown.
The four were driving through Matamoros – a city of 500,000 located directly across the border from the Texas town of Brownsville – in a white minivan with North Carolina license plates when unidentified gunmen opened fire, the FBI said this week.
The video shows them being loaded into a pickup truck by heavily armed men.
One is manhandled onto the vehicle while others appear to be unconscious and are dragged to the truck.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador described the incident as a “confrontation between armed groups”.
One of the victims was traveling to the Mexican border town to have a tummy tuck, a cosmetic surgery procedure to remove abdominal fat, relatives told US media outlets.
According to an unnamed US official cited by CNN, investigators think a Mexican drug cartel probably mistook the
Americans for Haitian drug smugglers.
Barbara Burgess, Ms. McGee’s mother, told ABC News that she had asked her daughter not to go, but her daughter had reassured her she would be safe.
The FBI had offered a $50,000 (£42,000) reward for the return of the Americans.
