The Mexican justice ordered this Saturday the temporary detention of the country’s former attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, the day after his arrest in the investigation into the disappearance in 2014 of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa normal school, in the south of the country.
This measure was taken “in order to guarantee his appearance at the hearing” scheduled for next Wednesday that will determine whether the magistrate will be tried in this case, a judicial source indicated.
The former attorney general was arrested at his home in Mexico City for “forced disappearance, torture and crimes against the administration of justice.” He was arrested after an initial hearing of almost 12 hours that took place in a court located within the prison itself. where the latter will remain a recluse.
A controversial first investigation
His lawyers have requested an extension of the deadline for the defense to present its arguments, for which the next hearing has been set for Wednesday, the judicial source indicated.
Jesús Murillo Karam, who served under President Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018) and led a controversial first investigation into these disappearances, is a former heavyweight of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) who ruled Mexico for 71 years continuously until the 2000.
This is the most important personality detained so far in the framework of these investigations, which had been restarted from scratch after the coming to power in 2019 of the left-wing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
43 students shot and burned
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, one of the worst cases of human rights violations in the world. . About 100,000 are missing. The prosecution has also issued arrest warrants against 64 police and military personnel, as well as against 14 members of the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel.
Source: BFM TV
