RIO DE JANEIRO (AP):

Brazilian news media are reporting that police have found the bodies of six teenagers who disappeared during a visit to a waterfall.

Police tell local newspapers that the youth, aged 16 to 19, were found yesterday morning. They had been stabbed, shot, and wrapped in a sheet, then dumped on the side of a highway in Rio de Janeiro state.

Nilopolis town police chief Sandra Ornelas tells the O Globo newspaper the six had left on the trip Saturday and relatives reported them missing the next day. Police did not return calls seeking confirmation yesterday.

Ornelas says the teenagers were tortured, and may have been killed as a demonstration of power by a drug-trafficking gang that controls a nearby shantytown. She says the murders are being investigated.