MEXICO CITY, Jan 19: Federal agents acting on a tip found six bodies buried in a shallow grave on Friday at a house in the northern city of Chihuahua.

The agents using picks and shovels and cadaver-sniffing dogs began digging on Thursday at a house in Chihuahua City, about 400 kilometres south of El Paso, Texas, after an anonymous caller told police that people were buried there, the federal attorney general’s office said in a news release.

The caller told authorities the house was used by the Juarez drug cartel, whose base is the border city of Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso. The bodies had not yet been identified, and investigators still were determining how they died, according to the statement.The discovery comes after a bloody week in which federal police and soldiers clashed with gunmen working for the Arellano Felix cartel in the border city of Tijuana.

A federal agent and a gunman where killed in the three-hour shootout that forced the evacuations of nearby schools. Authorities later found six slain kidnapping victims inside a house used by the gunmen.

In January 2004, police unearthed 12 bodies in a backyard in Ciudad Juarez. Most of those victims were strangled or suffocated.—AP