Authorities in Mexico can now say with “legal certainty” that 43 students who went missing in September last year were murdered by hitmen working for a drug gang, Mexican Minister of Justice Jesus Murillo Karam said on Tuesday.
However, parents of the students in a case that convulsed the nation and countries abroad insisted the case not be closed.
The disappearance of the men — all aspiring teachers attending classes at a training college in Guerrero State — sparked nationwide protests and a crisis for the government of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto.
Photo: Reuters
Officials said the students vanished after gang-linked police attacked their buses in the city of Iguala, allegedly under orders from the mayor and his wife in a night of terror that left six other people dead.
The police then delivered the young men to members of the Guerreros Unidos drug gang, who told investigators they took them in two trucks to a landfill, killed them, burned their bodies and dumped them in a river.
The investigation “gives us the legal certainty that the student teachers were killed in the circumstances that have been described,” Murillo Karam said at a press conference.
Witness and expert testimony “have allowed us to ... come to the conclusion beyond a doubt that the students were abducted and killed, before being incinerated and thrown into the San Juan River, in that order,” he said.
“It is the historic truth,” he said.
He played a video with testimony from detainees and footage from the investigation.
Until now, authorities had still officially considered the students to be missing.
Relatives of the victims, who marched on Monday with several thousand people in Mexico City to mark the four-month mark since their disappearance, have refused to accept the official explanation of events.
For now, only one of the students has been positively identified from charred remains, which leaves little hope of finding the 42 others.
“We the parents repudiate the way in which today the attorney general has sought to close the investigation,” said Felipe de la Cruz, a spokesman for the relatives.
“We are not going to allow them to conclude or close the investigation,” he added, surrounded by activists and desperate parents.
The latter are clinging to the belief that the students remain alive and are in the custody of Mexican security forces.
De la Cruz said his people do not want the probe to be closed because so far only one set of remains corresponds to those of the missing students.
The investigation has determined that a man named Felipe Rodriguez, arrested on Jan. 15, gave key testimony to the effect that the students were identified as members of Los Rojos, rivals of the Guerreros Unidos.
Detainees in the crime said there were at least three from Los Rojos infiltrated among the students. However, prosecutors have no proof of this.
Prosecutors say Rodriquez was the head of the Guerreros Unidos hitmen squad and gave the order to kill the students. He and other suspects will be charged with murder.
The detained former mayor of Iguala, Jose Luis Abarca, accused of giving the initial order to attack the students, is allegedly one of the leaders of the Guerreros Unidos.
Crowds in Bangladesh are flocking to snap photographs with an unlikely social media star — an albino buffalo with flowing blond hair nicknamed “Donald Trump” that is due to be sacrificed within days. Owner Zia Uddin Mridha, 38, said his brother named the 700kg bull over its flowing helmet of hair resembling the signature look of the US president. “My younger brother picked this name because of the buffalo’s extraordinary hair,” he said at his farm in Narayanganj, just outside the capital, Dhaka. Mridha said that a constant stream of curious visitors — social media fans, onlookers and children — have come throughout
The Philippines said it has asked the country’s Supreme Court to allow it to arrest former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s chief drug war enforcer to stand trial in an international tribunal. The International Criminal Court (ICC) last week unsealed an arrest warrant against Philippine Senator Ronald dela Rosa, accusing him along with Duterte and other “coperpetrators” of the “crime against humanity of murder.” Dela Rosa briefly sought refuge in the Philippine Senate last week while asking the Philippine Supreme Court to stop an ongoing attempt by government agents to arrest him. “By his own conduct, he has placed himself outside the protection of
The researchers in Ireland looked at their computer screen, marveling at a medieval book tracked down in a Roman library. They flipped through its digitized pages and found their sought-after treasure: the oldest surviving English poem. “We were extremely surprised. We were speechless. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we first saw that,” said Elisabetta Magnanti, a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin’s school of English. The poem was also within the main body of Latin text, she said, calling it “extraordinary.” Composed in Old English by a Northumbrian agricultural worker in the 7th century, Caedmon’s Hymn appears within some copies of
BIGGER ROLE: Beijing has said it maintains an impartial stance on the war in Ukraine, but by training Russian troops, China is far more involved than previously known China’s armed forces secretly trained about 200 Russian military personnel in China late last year, and some have since returned to fight in Ukraine, according to three European intelligence agencies and documents seen by Reuters. While China and Russia have held a number of joint military exercises since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Beijing has repeatedly said that it is neutral in the conflict and presents itself as a peace mediator. The covert training sessions, which predominantly focused on the use of drones, were outlined in a dual-language Russian-Chinese agreement signed by senior Russian and Chinese officers in Beijing on
RSS