Mexico police search for migrants kidnapped off coach

Police in Mexico are searching for dozens of migrants who were abducted at gunpoint from a coach that was taking them to the US-Mexico border.

Gunmen boarded the bus on Saturday and seized 31 passenger, who are thought to be mostly from South America.

A number of Mexican passengers and the driver, who were not kidnapped, raised the alarm.

Migrants are often targeted by gangs, which hold them until a ransom is paid by their families.

Those abducted on Saturday were travelling in a commercial coach operated by the company Senda, which was taking them from the industrial city of Monterrey to Matamoros, just south of the US border.

The Mexican passengers described how the bus was intercepted by five cars carrying armed men.

The migrants, the majority of whom are thought to be from Venezuela, were forced to get off the coach while the Mexican passengers were left behind.

Local media said that the Venezuelans were on their way to the border for a scheduled asylum hearing with US officials when they were abducted.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that an intense police search was under way.

During checks carried out on the highway on Monday, members of the security forces stopped a suspicious vehicle in which five Venezuelan migrants, including two children, were being held.

In a sign of how common abductions of migrants are in this border region, officials said that the five Venezuelans had been abducted from another Senda coach in a separate incident, which also occurred on the weekend.

It is not clear which gang may be holding the 31 who are still missing but migrant rights advocates had warned of an increase in kidnappings for ransom in recent weeks.

Father Francisco Gallardo, a Catholic priest who runs a migrant shelter in the town of Matamoros, said mass kidnappings had become a common occurrence.

Father Francisco said that migrants arriving at his shelter had told him how gangs would seize entire families and threaten to kill them unless they or their relatives paid hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars as ransom.

The state of Tamaulipas, where Matamoros is located, has long been notorious for violence against migrants.

In 2010, it was the scene of one of the worst massacres in which 72 South and Central American kidnapped migrants were killed by members of Los Zetas gang after they refused to work for the cartel.

Because of the dangers threatening migrants travelling through Mexico, some choose to seek safety in numbers by joining migrant caravans, large groups of people heading to the border, mainly on foot.

A migrant holding her son talks with an official from the National Migration Institute (INM) before boarding a bus, after finishing a migrant caravan heading to the United States, in the municipality of Mapastepec, state of Chiapas, Mexico, 02 January 2024

But on Tuesday, Mexican officials said that after travelling more than 100km (62 miles), the group had dispersed, with the majority taken up an offer to board buses to a migrant processing centre operated by Mexico in the southern city of Mapastepec.

Mexico has come under pressure from the US to reduce the number of migrants crossing its territory to reach the United States.

President López Obrador said he had reached "important agreements" in a meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Mexico City last week but did not specify what those agreements were.