CANCUN, MEXICO -- Retired army Gen. Mauro Enrique Tello Quiñones, a civilian and another soldier, found dead near this Caribbean resort city, were tortured before being shot and killed, authorities say.

"We have to determine where the execution took place, where the torture occurred, surely in some safe house that the criminal groups must have," Bello Melchor Rodriguez y Carrillo, the state attorney general of Quintano Roo, said Wednesday.

The general, who served as military attache at the Mexican Embassy in Spain and as commander of the military zone of the western state of Michoacan, was remembered in a funeral service at a military base in Cancun and his remains are to be taken to Mexico City.

Quiñones, 63, was found dead on Tuesday in a van on the highway that links Cancun to Merida, capital of neighboring Yucatan state, together with army Lt. Gertulio Cesar Roman Zuñiga and civilian Juan Dominguez Sanchez.

"The result of the autopsy shows that they were tortured before being riddled with bullets," the Quintana Roo AG said. EFE