News / Mexico

Mexican policemen implicated in missing students case

Thursday, 14 April 2016 11:43 PM [ Last Update: Thursday, 14 April 2016 11:57 PM ]

Students place portraits of 43 missing students in front of the congress of the state of Guerrero in Chilpancingo, Mexico, during a protest on September 24, 2015. ©AFP

Mexican authorities say a number of police officers purportedly had a role in the disappearance of 43 college students in the country’s southern state of Guerrero back in September 2014.

Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission said on Thursday that an eyewitness saw two federal policemen near the courthouse in the town of Iguala, where municipal officials had stopped a bus carrying 15 to 20 students before taking them to the town of Huitzuco. The witness said members of Huitzuco's police force had also participated in turning the students over to a drug gang in the southern town.

The commission further noted that the police department from Huitzuco had previously been implicated in the disappearance, which took place during a protest rally over teachers’ rights on September 26, 2014.

Jose Larrieta Carrasco, a member of the commission probing the Iguala case, said authorities should investigate a “new route in the disappearance” of the students.

Mexico's Attorney General Arely Gómez González announced last year that Iguala and Cocula police officers had abducted the students, and delivered them to the Guerreros Unidos drug gang.

The gang then reportedly slaughtered the students, incinerated their bodies at a garbage dump in Cocula town in the same Mexican state, and dropped their remains in a nearby river. Mexican police then apprehended fugitive Iguala mayor Jose Luis Abarca and his wife in connection with the case. Investigators said the police attack on the students was ordered by Abarca over fears that the students might disrupt a speech by his wife Pineda Villa.

However, independent experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights say that there is no scientific evidence to support the account that the 43 students were burned at the site.

People gathering at Mexico City's Zocalo Square show their support for the parents, relatives and friends of the 43 missing students from a rural teachers college from Ayotzinapa, in the state of Guerrero, as the parents hold a meeting with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, on September 24, 2015. ©AFP

Last August, Miguel Ángel Jiménez Blanco, a prominent Mexican political activist, who played a major role in the search for the disappearance of the students and a number of other similar cases, was found dead.

The bullet-ridden body of Jimenez was found in a car on the outskirts of his hometown of Xaltianguis, where he had helped establish a community police program.

Official figures show that more than 35,000 people are currently missing in Mexico due to violence. Thousands of people have also been killed in drug-related violence in the country over the past few years.

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