Gunmen killed a Florida couple, their 8-year-old grandson and two others during a robbery on a central Cuban highway, official sources and family members said Tuesday.
Four were identified as members of the same family and the fifth as a family friend who was driving the car. Family members and a morgue employee said the victims were shot to death.
Multiple killings are almost unheard of, and slayings of visitors to the communist country whose economy depends heavily on foreign tourism are extremely rare.
Osmani Placencia of Hialeah, Fla., identified the dead as his parents, Ada Lorenzo, 52, and Celedonio Placencia, 62, both Cuba natives with legal U.S. residency; his son, Daniel Osmani Placencia, 8, of Cuba; his sister, Yailen Placencia, 28, of Cuba; and Domingo Delgado, a family friend who was driving.
The couple flew to Cuba on Sunday to deliver medicine and supplies to sick relatives in Santa Clara.
Cuba's official media did not report the killings and there was no comment Tuesday from official government spokesmen.
But several government sources privately confirmed the five were slain in an apparent robbery attempt in Matanzas province while driving east from Havana to visit relatives in Santa Clara, in Las Villas province. It wasn't immediately clear if the killings occurred Sunday or Monday.
A woman reached later at the forensic services office the morgue in Matanzas said the victims had been shot. The woman also refused to give her name.
Most Cubans are not allowed to carry firearms, which are restricted to police and the military. However, criminals have been known to obtain firearms on the black market.
"They robbed them and then they killed them," Placencia told Spanish language television in Miami.
Family and friends of the victims, gathered in Florida Tuesday to mourn and remember.
Yisel Placencia, the couple's daughter, broke down as she looked at photographs of the victims. One showed her sister Yailen smiling as she hugged their parents. Another showed Daniel happily playing in front of his Santa Clara home.
Jorge Lorenzo, Ada Lorenzo's brother, said family members had no plans to go to Cuba and that Cuban authorities assured them they were working "night and day" on the case.
Cuban exile groups in Miami who oppose leader Fidel Castro said the killings show the Caribbean island is dangerous.
The bodies were retrieved by a relative early Tuesday from the Matanzas morgue and taken to a funeral home in Santa Clara, where several hundred people paid their respects amid heavy police security.
"What is certain is that they were murdered," Armando Lopez, a neighbor of the victims' relatives in Santa Clara, told Associated Press Television News. "Nobody knows why."
Officials at the U.S. Interests Section, the American mission here, said they had no information about the case but would not be contacted if no American citizens were involved.