Many faculty members and students at the University of British Columbia are arriving at school on Friday to the news that a PhD student was brutally murdered in Mexico along with her boyfriend.
The remains of Carmen Ximena Osegueda Magana, who went missing on Dec. 14, and her Mexican partner Alejandro Honorio Santamaria were found last week partially buried on a beach.
They had both been stabbed in the neck and their remains set on fire, according to Manuel de Jesus Lopez, an attorney general in the southern state of Oaxaca. Relatives helped search for the pair and it was Osegueda's Canadian ex-husband who eventually found both bodies. Identification of their badly decomposed remains took days.
There are also reports that the female victim was bound and had been strangled.
"When something like this happens in a community as tight knit as UBC of course it really, really affects people who knew her, who were colleagues," said university spokesperson Lucie McNeill.
Police have not announced a motive for the murder but some local news agencies have said the slaying could be connected to organized crime.
Earlier in the week another Canadian was killed in Mexico. Salt Spring Island resident Robin Wood was killed when he tried to intervene in the robbery of a friend's home in Melaque, south of Puerto Vallarta.
That incident has been described as an "isolated robbery" by police. But the deaths -- both in southern resort towns thought to be safe from the violence that plagues northern Mexico -- have raised fears that tourists are being targeted and aren't simply being caught in the crossfire.
Not so, insists the Canadian government. Deepak Obhrai, parliamentary secretary to the minister of foreign affairs, says Ottawa is aware of the violent crime problem but does not believe tourists are being singled out in Mexico.
For that reason, he says, Ottawa's advisory against non-essential travel to Mexico's northern border has not been extended south.
CTV B.C.'s Brent Shearer said Ximena Osegueda -- as she was known at UBC -- was in Huatulco working on her doctoral thesis.
"She had been down in Huatulco, Mexico pursuing her work down there, getting further on in her studies when this terrible tragedy happened, she and her male partner found dead with local media tying this to organized crime," Shearer told CTV News Channel Friday morning, reporting from the UBC campus.
A biography on the UBC website said she taught undergraduate courses at Universidad del Mar in Mexico and was specializing in colonial Latin American literature, with a focus on Mexico, in her own studies.
She received an undergraduate degree in political science, and a graduate degree in Hispanic studies, from McGill University.
"Her interest lies in the interaction between text and society: how they affect each other and how power relations are manifested in them and because of them," said the website.
Jon Beasley-Murray, an assistant professor in the department of French, Italian and Hispanic studies at UBC said the 39-year-old woman will be deeply missed.
"What happened to Ximena is a great tragedy and a huge loss," Beasley-Murray said. "She will be very much missed in the department here at UBC."
Shearer said UBC's administration has indicated it will do anything it can to help students deal with the loss of the well-liked, popular woman.
