Culiacan, Mexico:
Mexican authorities have arrested three men over the suspected murders of two Australian surfers whose burnt-out van was found with two unidentified bodies last weekend, prosecutors said Friday.
The suspects confessed to shooting a long-haired tourist in the face when he resisted a robbery on a road in the gang-plagued northwestern state of Sinaloa on November 21, said chief state prosecutor Marco Antonio Higuera Gomez.
The robbers killed the second man, drove the vehicle to another location and "set fire to the van with two bodies inside," Higuera told reporters.
The prosecutor stressed that while the case was being investigated as a murder, the identity of the two bodies has yet to be confirmed through DNA tests.
Two other suspects are on the run. Prosecutors did not say when the arrests were made.
"These people are part of a criminal group dedicated to vehicle thefts, drug dealing and with a history of committing murders," Higuera said.
Dean Lucas and Adam Coleman, both 33, were last reported in the Sinaloa town of Topolobampo on November 20 after arriving on a ferry from the Baja California peninsula.
The two men had driven from Edmonton, Canada and across the United States to Mexico to join Coleman's Mexican girlfriend in the western city of Guadalajara.