BY JOHN RICE
 Associated Press

 MEXICO CITY -- The two paintings by famed Mexican artist Diego Rivera hold a
 bluntly political message: As Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong hold out a dove of
 peace, bloodthirsty American leaders stand amid mutilated bodies.

 But the fate of the two works remains nearly as murky as it did 43 years ago
 when they vanished during a touring exhibition of Eastern Europe and China. The
 daily Mexican newspaper La Jornada reported Friday that the murals had been
 found in a Moscow warehouse -- but the mystery remains.

 Following the report, Mexican officials confirmed that Paris-based art curator
 Christina Burrus told them she had seen at least one of the paintings -- and by
 some accounts both -- in a warehouse of Moscow's Pushkin Museum in 1997.

 But Blanca Garduno, director of the Mexican government's Diego Rivera Museum,
 said at a news conference Friday that years of investigation have produced no
 hard evidence of the whereabouts of one of the murals, the massive Nightmare of
 War, Dreams of Peace. ``We cannot say with precision that it is in the Pushkin
 Museum,'' she said.

 MUSEUM DROPS HINTS

 Even so, the director of Mexico's National Institute of Fine Arts, Gerardo Estrada,
 said Pushkin officials had hinted they did have the 432-square-foot mural, with its
 portrayal of benevolent communist dictators attempting to head off nuclear war.

 ``They even said that if we needed it for an exposition, they could loan it for
 something like $200,000,'' Estrada was quoted as telling La Jornada.

 The Pushkin Museum's administrator for acquisitions, Maria Osinenko, said in
 Moscow that it was ``clearly false'' to say the museum had Nightmare of War.

 But she said that the museum has had Glorious Victory -- another Rivera mural
 missing from the same exhibition -- since 1958.

 Burrus herself was reluctant to speak about the murals.

 ``I know where they are, but I have nothing to say,'' she said from Paris, though
 she indicated that she might publish something about the matter later this year.

 The works were painted when an aging Rivera was trying to regain membership in
 the Stalinist Mexican Communist Party, which viewed him with suspicion
 because he had formerly followed Soviet apostate Leon Trotsky.

 ARTIST'S TABLEAU

 Nightmare of War portrays Stalin and Mao holding out a dove of peace to
 cartoon-like figures representing the United States, Britain and France as a
 mushroom cloud blooms over a Korean War battleground.

 Prominent friends of Rivera -- including his longtime companion, the painter Frida
 Kahlo -- are shown collecting signatures demanding an end to the war.

 The satirically titled Glorious Victory portrays U.S. Secretary of State John Foster
 Dulles amid bodies and bananas shaking hands with Carlos Castillo Armas, a
 Guatemalan officer installed as president by a CIA-run coup in 1954.

 President Dwight Eisenhower's face adorns a bomb.

 The government paid for Nightmare of War, but it was so controversial that
 Mexican officials refused to display it.

 Both paintings were part of a traveling exhibition that was in China until the first
 week of 1956, when it went to Moscow.

 When the exhibition returned to Mexico in 1957, several other paintings also were
 missing: an important painting by Kahlo and two by Pablo O'Higgins. Garduno
 said Rivera told an interviewer in 1957, a year before his death, that Glorious
 Victory was missing.