The body of a man, who witnesses said was tossed from a plane, landed on a hospital roof in Mexico’s northern Sinaloa state on Wednesday, according to a public health service official in the region, which is home to notorious drug traffickers.
The body landed on the roof of an IMSS hospital in the town of Eldorado, around 7:30 a.m. local time, said the official, who was not authorized to give his name.
Witnesses standing outside the health center reported a plane flying low over the hospital and a person thrown out, the health official said.
He said two more bodies were reported to have been found in the town, which lies about 60 kilometers (40 miles) south of Culiacan, the state capital. Local media reported that those two bodies were thrown from the same plane as the body that landed on the hospital.
The official did not know if the man was alive when he was thrown from the plane. Officials from the state prosecutor’s office were at the scene, he said.
The state prosecutor’s office did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
“This is an agricultural area and planes are regularly used for fumigation,” the official said, adding that the IMSS hospital was operating normally.
Local media reported that suspected gang members had picked up the two other corpses thrown from the plane.
Sinaloa is the home state of Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman, who ran the Sinaloa drug cartel until his arrest in 2016. He was extradited to the United States earlier this year.
Ever since Chapo’s arrest, security in the state has deteriorated, as the Sinaloa cartel struggles to adapt to infighting and fresh threats from rival groups.
(Reporting by Gabriel Stargardter; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel and Leslie Adler)
