Mexico’s attorney general says detainees admitted setting fire to bodies whose unidentified remains are believed to be those of the missing studentsMexico’s attorney general says detainees admitted setting fire to bodies whose unidentified remains are believed to be those of the missing students.
Source: The Guardian
Any hope of finding alive the 43 students who disappeared nearly six weeks ago in the southern city of Iguala after being attacked by police, has been close to extinguished by the announcement by federal investigators that they have established that a large group of people were massacred by a local drug trafficking gang in a nearby rubbish dump on the same night.
Attorney General Jesús Murillo told a press conference, however, that while there are “many indications” that the victims were the students, the human remains left by the massacre and recovered by investigators from a nearby river are so badly burned that they cannot currently be identified.
The students, he said, remained “disappeared” and the investigation was continuing.
“I know the huge pain that the information we have obtained causes the family members,” Murillo said. “This is something that should never have happened, and must never be repeated.”
The disappearance of the students has exposed both the terrifying levels of violence in some parts of Mexico where organised criminal groups dominate large territories, and the direct involvement of some local authorities in the horror.
It has also underlined the long standing tolerance by the federal authorities of collusion between local politicians, police forces and organised crime. Under pressure to prove that this tolerance has come to an end, Murillo went over the evidence in the case of the disappeared students so far in a lengthy and chilling account of the events that began, he said, when the mayor of Iguala ordered the municipal police to attack the students on the night of 26 September.