MATAMOROS, Mexico (AP) — Mexican officials say four bodies have been found east of the border city of Matamoros, near where three young Americans went missing more than two weeks ago.

Tamaulipas state investigator Raul Galindo Vira on Wednesday confirmed the bodies had been found, but he declined to discuss who they might be.

A second state official said investigators were trying to determine if they include three siblings from Progreso, Texas, who disappeared with a fourth person on Oct. 13. The official, who said the bodies were badly decomposed, insisted on speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

Mexican authorities on Wednesday asked the siblings' father what they were wearing when they disappeared, mother Raquel Alvarado told The Associated Press.

Alvarado said witnesses saw armed men seize her daughter, Erica Alvarado Rivera, 26, and her sons, Alex, 22, and Jose Angel, 21, in El Control, a small town near the Texas border west of Matamoros. The three were visiting their father in Mexico. Erica is the mother of four children aged 3-9.

The mother said Erica Alvarado drove her black Jeep Cherokee across the border Oct. 12 and dropped it at her father's house in El Control. She visited her boyfriend there and the next morning called her brothers to ask them to bring the Cherokee to a roadside restaurant where the couple was eating. The three siblings planned to return to Progreso together from there.

When Alex and Jose Angel Alvarado arrived to pick up their sister, they saw men "pushing their sister and her boyfriend and hitting her," Raquel Alvarado said.

Witnesses said the brothers tried to intervene, but they were taken away by armed men who identified themselves as part of Grupo Hercules, a recently formed police security unit for Matamoros city officials, and were traveling in military style trucks. Alvarado said witnesses also saw federal highway police, "but no one did anything."

The Matamoros mayor's office and a spokeswoman for the city did not respond to requests for comment.

As night fell Wednesday, Martha Hernandez, who had raised 32-year-old Jose Guadalupe Castaneda Benitez, Erica Alvarado's boyfriend, waited outside state police offices in Matamoros for any word on his whereabouts. She said no one had told her that four bodies had been found.

Hernandez said a friend who saw Castaneda and the Alvarados being picked up also told her the Hercules unit was responsible, and she expressed anger at the Matamoros mayor who formed the unit, which sometimes dresses in military-style camouflage.

"We will keep searching," she said. "They can't just disappear. We are going to be like in Guerrero."

Hernandez was referring to the southern state of Guerrero, where 43 teachers college students disappeared Sept. 26 at the hands of police.

Authorities say police in the Guerrero city of Iguala attacked the students on orders from the mayor because of fears the students planned to disrupt a speech by the mayor's wife. Officers allegedly turned the students over to the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel. In a month of searching the area, including combing a ravine outside a nearby town on Wednesday, federal authorities have discovered several clandestine mass graves but no sign of the students.

President Enrique Pena Nieto held a closed-door meeting Wednesday with parents of the missing students.