Mexican children who 'torture and kill six-year-old in game of kidnap' charged with murder
Five Mexican children accused of torturing and killing a six-year-old boy before burying the body and keeping their crime a secret have been charged with murder.
The two 15-year-old boys, two 13-year-old girls and one 11-year-old boy attended the court hearing in the state of Chihuahua, a week after the murder of Christopher Raymundo Marquez.
He was found buried under a dead dog and weeds next to a stream on the outskirts of the state's capital on May 14. Prosecutors say the children had tied him up, nearly asphyxiated him, stoned him and stabbed him.
The judge, Francisco de Leon Merino, ordered that the 15-year-old boys be jailed in the Chihuahua court for minors while the three younger ones be kept under the custody of the state child services agency.
The case has raised questions about the influence of Mexico's relentless drug war on young minds after tens of thousands of people have been killed since 2006.
The five minors said they had invited six-year-old Christopher Raymundo Márquez Mora to play with them by the steep-banked stream where they were looking for firewood last Thursday.
They decided to tie up the boy and "play the kidnap game", proceeding to beat him with a club and throwing stones at his face. Finally, Christopher was strangled to death with a stick placed around his neck.
Children have been dragged into the vortex of Mexico's spiralling criminal activity over the past decade, in which around 50,000 people were killed in the five years up to 2011 as the government fought crime cartels and the latter battled against each other.
A 2013 report by Mexican parliament's public safety committee found that 30,000 minors were involved in crimes ranging from drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping and murder.
The first case to shock Mexicans was that of Edgar N. Jiménez, who was arrested in 2010 at the age of 14 having been trained to kill and kidnap by the Pacífico Sur drug cartel. Jiménez, known as El Ponchis, confessed to four murders. "I've killed four people; I slit their throats. I felt bad doing it but they made me. If I didn't do it, they were going to kill me."
On his release in 2013, El Ponchis was deported to the United States for his own security after 12 adolescents had been murdered on being released from detention in the previous two years, presumably eliminated by their former criminal associates.
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