Mexican authorities arrested two people in connection with the grisly murders of a lesbian couple from El Paso, Texas.
Police arrested a 25-year-old man and 24-year-old woman and charged them with femicide. Their names were not released to the public.
Nohemi Martinez (left) and Yulizsa Ramirez (right), both 28, were killed while visiting family in Ciudad Juárez, according to reports.
Their body parts were stuffed in trash bags and scattered along a highway about 17 miles apart from each other in the neighborhoods of San Agustin and Jesus Carranza.
Authorities say Martinez and Ramirez, who were married in June 2021, were lured to a home in the town of San Isidro on Jan. 15.
Evidence shows they were tortured, shot and dismembered inside the home. Their body parts were discovered by police in garbage bags scattered along a highway in two towns, according to KSMS-TV.
The two women were parents to three children who are now orphans in El Paso, Texas.
Activists organized the March for Affective-Sexual Diversities in Ciudad Juárez and demanded justice for the “terrible and brutal crime of two lesbian women”.
The marchers carried signs that read: “Lesbofobia” and “Justicia para Yulizsa y Nohemi (Justice for Yulizsa and Nohemi).”
“It is a femicide and, surely, a hate crime due to lesbophobia, since it cannot be otherwise given the cruelty and viciousness with which they were murdered,” the group said in a statement to El Diario.
However, Mexican authorities determined the murders were not hate crimes, according to the Washington Post.
The murders are “linked to the economic activity that both victims carried out and with the people they related to in that environment,” the attorney general’s office said in a statement to The Post.
