Five skeletal remains were found in a remote Arizona smuggling corridor last week and local authorities now believe the victims were either shot or beaten to death.

Border Patrol agents found the human remains a little over a week ago covered by rocks in the desert around 130 miles south of Phoenix near the town of Sells on the Tohono O'dham Reservation according to Reuters.

The bones were put through a preliminary examination on June 4 and Pima County Chief Medical Examiner Gregory Hess said trauma to the bones showed the five individuals were either bludgeoned or shot to death.

"We are treating it as a likely homicide. However, we don't know how those injuries were inflicted yet, and whether or not those injuries were blunt force injuries that caused the bones to be traumatized or were gunshot injuries," Hess said according to Reuters.

 Hess believes the victims were killed together. The age, sex, and time of death of the five people have yet to be determined.

It's currently believed the five people were from Mexico or Central America according to Hess.

"We believe that they are the remains of five foreign nationals who were killed either there or somewhere else and put in that location," Hess said according to Reuters.

While deaths are not uncommon among border crossers, they are mostly caused by heat exposure in the summer months.

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