Acapulco, Mexico, Dec 17 (EFE).– After previously denying media reports about the discovery of nearly a score of bodies, the governor of the southern Mexican state of Guerrero said Thursday that a federal prosecutor had informed him that a large number of human remains had been found.

“Indeed, the (federal) Attorney General’s Office is investigating the discovery of the bodies,” Hector Astudillo, a member of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, said.

He added that he had received the information 20 minutes earlier from the head of the AG’s office’s delegation in Guerrero, Jose Juan Monroy.

Asked if a total of 19 bodies had been found, as reported Tuesday by local media, Astudillo said “around there.”

“The AG’s office is still investigating, and they’ll be the ones to give you the details,” the governor said, adding that prosecutors had been very secretive about the find, providing the information to some media outlets but not formally notifying the Guerrero state government.

Sources with the AG’s office, however, told EFE Wednesday that state emergency management officials had collaborated in the effort to recover the bodies.

In remarks to reporters Wednesday in Chilpancingo, the state capital, Astudillo denied that any bodies had been found.

“This doesn’t exist. Why do you insist on talking about something that’s incorrect?” the governor asked, adding that he had spoken Wednesday morning with Monroy and been told that no investigation had yet been launched.

On Tuesday, his office issued an official bulletin on its Web site saying that reports about the existence of bodies in a ravine outside the town of Chichihualco were false, although it was removed shortly afterward with no explanation.

The director of the disappeared persons task force of the federal AG’s office, Joaquin Torres, on Tuesday confirmed the discovery and recovery of 19 bodies near Chichihualco in a meeting with relatives of missing persons in the city of Iguala.

The media reports, published Tuesday, cited sources with the AG’s office as saying the task force headed by Torres had removed the bodies between Dec. 8 and Dec. 11.

Asked about the matter after a meeting Wednesday with families of the 43 missing students from the all-male Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School, a teacher training facility also located in Guerrero, Government Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said only that an investigation was currently being conducted.

Guerrero is experiencing a wave of violence that has left hundreds of people dead since the 43 Ayotzinapa students went missing in Iguala after commandeering buses that they had planned to use for transportation to a protest in Mexico City.

They disappeared at the hands of corrupt local police and a violent, locally powerful drug cartel, according to federal authorities, although the students’ relatives have slammed the federal probe as slipshod and possibly aimed at covering up the truth.

Federal sources said earlier this week that the 19 bodies did not correspond to those of the 43 trainee teachers who were abducted in September 2014 in Iguala and apparently murdered, noting that the remains found near Chichihualco were those of individuals who had died more recently.

Astudillo, who took office in October, said Monday that despite a newly launched federal security initiative in Guerrero violence will persist in the state until employment is provided for “those dedicated to growing and selling marijuana and opium poppy.” EFE