Argentine forensic experts who have studied a dump in southern Mexico where Mexican government officials claim the bodies of 43 missing students were burned on Saturday said that results from a new investigation of the site are incomplete and inconclusive.
The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team released a statement saying that the latest investigation by a team of experts “neither confirms nor denies” the official version of what happened to the students from the Rural Normal School at Ayotzinapa.
The team were called in shortly after the teachers’ college students disappeared in Iguala in Guerrero State on Sept. 26, 2014. An investigation by the Mexican government concluded that they were killed by a local drug gang after being confused with members of a rival group.
They were purportedly taken by corrupt local police and handed over to the gang, which incinerated their bodies at a dump in the nearby town of Cocula and threw the remains into a river.
The team studied the dump and said first in January last year and later in a full report released in February that the evidence did not support the official version of events.
In September last year, another team of independent experts sent by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights released a report that dismantled the government’s investigation.
The report said police and the military were monitoring the students, but no one intervened when they were attacked.
On Friday, a representative of the new team said it had found evidence of a large fire at the Cocula dump.
Team member Ricardo Damian Torres said the remains of at least 17 burned bodies were found in the dump, but he did not specify when the bodies were incinerated.
“There is sufficient evidence, including physically observable, to affirm that there was a controlled fire event of great dimensions in the place called the Cocula dump,” he said, speaking for the six-member fire-expert team.
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