In an unexpected turn of the case, the official who investigated the disappearance of Ayotzinapa’s 43 students is arrested in Mexico

The justice of Mexico gave an unpredictable turn to the investigation of the sensational Ayotzinapa casethe forced disappearance of 43 students in 2014, due to arrest the principal case officer and issue arrest warrants against 64 military and police officers allegedly involved in the crime.

Former Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam was arrested at his home in an exclusive neighborhood in Mexico City “forced disappearances, torture and crimes against the administration of justice”as reported in a note by the Attorney General of the Republic (FGR).

Murillo Karam is the highest former official arrested for the disappearance of teaching students which took place in the state of Guerrero. A lawyer during the rule of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), Murillo became a heavyweight of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico for 71 years without interruption until December 2000.

Hours later, the FGR reported the arrest warrants against 20 soldiers and 44 policemenwithout specifying their rank and current activity, as well as another 19 against five state officials and 14 members of the Guerreros Unidos cartel, alleged perpetrators of the crime.

The lawyer of the relatives of the 43, Vidulfo Rosales, considered the arrest of Murillo Karam “an important step”, but he was skeptical of possible information that the former prosecutor could reveal.

“What Mr. Murillo will do is defend himself, so I don’t think (…) he wants to give any information,” Rosales told ForoTV.

Murillo’s arrest came just hours after President Andrés Manuel López Obrador demanded “truth” and punishment for those responsible for the disappearance of the students, after the report by a government commission that has been investigating the case since 2019 was published on Thursday. consider a “state crime”.

The document supports this military and civil servantsfor their “actions, omissions or investments”, allowed the kidnapping and death of the students of Ayotzinapa’s normal school and six other people at the hands of the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel.

The disappearance of the students took place between the night of September 26 and the early morning of September 27, 2014, when they were traveling to the city of Iguala, in the state of Guerrero, to find the buses with which they intended to go to Mexico City to participate in the protests. .

This incident constitutes one of the worst human rights violations in Mexico, where some 100,000 are missing, and has generated strong international condemnation.

During the government of Peña Nieto, the so-called “historical truth” was accepted for the resolution of the case, officially presented by Murillo Karam, who did not demonstrate the responsibility of the military.

According to this version, the young people were arrested and handed over by local police to Guerreros Unidos when they were mistaken for members of an enemy gang. After being shot, their remains were incinerated and thrown in the Cocula landfill.