Mexican justice ordered on Friday the arrest of the country’s former attorney general and 64 police and military personnel for the disappearance in 2014 of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa normal school, in the south, the day after the publication of a report by an official . commission that described the case as a “state crime”.
On Friday night, former Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam was arrested at his home in Mexico City for “forced disappearance, torture and crimes against the administration of justice,” and did not offer resistance, the prosecution said in a press release.
Subsequently, the Prosecutor’s Office announced that arrest warrants had been issued against 20 Army officers and 44 police officers for their alleged participation in the case, which caused a profound uproar in Mexico and abroad.
A controversial first investigation
These 64 police officers and soldiers are wanted for “organized crime, forced disappearance, torture, homicide and crimes against the administration of justice,” said the prosecution. The identities and range of those wanted were not specified.
Jesús Murillo Karam, who served President Enrique Peña Nieto between 2012 and 2018 and led a controversial initial investigation into these disappearances, is a former heavyweight of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) who ruled Mexico for 71 years without interruption until 2000.
He is the most important personality detained so far in the framework of these investigations, which started from scratch after the coming to power in 2019 of the left-wing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The prosecution also issued arrest warrants for 14 members of the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel.
43 students shot and burned in 2014
On the night of September 26-27, 2014, a group of students from the Ayotzinapa teacher training school in the southern state of Guerrero traveled to the nearby town of Iguala to “requisition” buses to go to Mexico City. to a demonstration.
According to the investigation, 43 young people were detained by local police in collusion with Guerreros Unidos, then shot and burned in a landfill for reasons that are still unclear. The remains of only three of them could be identified.
On Thursday, an official report published by the “Ayotzinapa Truth Commission” created by Andrés Manuel López Obrador had estimated that the Mexican military had part of the responsibility for this crime.
“Their actions, omissions or participation allowed the disappearance and execution of the students, as well as the murder of six other people,” said the Undersecretary of the Interior, Alejandro Encinas, during the public presentation of the report.
The Ayotzinapa case, a “state crime”
“There was no evidence of institutional action, but there were clear responsibilities of elements” of the armed forces, he added, without specifying whether these “elements” were still active. Alejandro Encinas has repeatedly described the Ayotzinapa case as a “state crime.”
Another commission, the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), which was created under an agreement between the Peña Nieto government and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), maintains that the soldiers falsified the evidence found in the garbage dump where bodies were deposited. Burned
“Prevent this from happening again”
The first official investigation, headed by Jesús Murillo Karam and whose conclusions were rejected by the relatives of the victims and by independent experts, did not attribute any responsibility to the military. This version accused a drug cartel of having the students killed by mistaking them for members of a rival gang.
“Making this atrocious and inhuman situation public, and at the same time sanctioning those responsible, makes it possible to prevent these unfortunate events from happening again” and “strengthens the institutional framework,” Andrés Manuel López Obrador said this Friday.
The Mexican president has also indicated that he will continue to urge Israel to obtain the extradition of the former head of the attorney general’s criminal investigation agency, Tomás Zeron. Accused of being involved in the Ayotzinapa case but claiming his innocence, this former high-ranking official fled to Israel where he applied for asylum.
Source: BFM TV
