Co-Hopfian and boundedly endo-rigid mixed abelian groups

For a given cardinal $\lambda$ and a torsion abelian group $K$ of cardinality less than $\lambda$, we present, under some mild conditions (for example $\lambda ={\lambda }^{{\mathrm{\aleph }}_0}$), boundedly endo-rigid abelian group $G$ of cardinality $\lambda$ with $Tor(G)=K$. Essentially, we give a complete characterization of such pairs $(K,\lambda )$. Among other things, we use a twofold version of the black box. We present an application of the construction of boundedly endo-rigid abelian groups. Namely, we turn to the existing problem of co-Hopfian abelian groups of a given size, and present some new classes of them, mainly in the case of mixed abelian groups. In particular, we give useful criteria to detect when a boundedly endo-rigid abelian group is co-Hopfian and completely determine cardinals $\lambda >2^{{\mathrm{\aleph }}_0}$ for which there is a co-Hopfian abelian group of size $\lambda$.