Experts Reject Official Account of How 43 Mexican Students Vanished

MEXICO CITY: An international committee of experts reviewing the case of 43 missing college students whose disappearance last fall traumatized Mexico said Sunday that there was no evidence to support the government’s conclusion that the students were executed by a drug gang that then burned the bodies to ashes in a garbage dump.

Not only did physical evidence contradict the government’s version of what happened to the students, but the review showed that federal police and soldiers knew that the students were being attacked by the municipal police and failed to intervene.

The report’s conclusions were a sharp rebuke to the government of President Enrique Pena Nieto, which had sought to put the case to rest. Its release could rekindle the widespread anger and incredulity that flared in the weeks after the students vanished from Iguala in the southern state of Guerrero on Sept. 26, 2014.

According to the government’s account, about 100 students who attended a teachers college in the town of Ayotzinapa went to Iguala to steal buses for transportation to a demonstration.

The authorities say that Iguala’s mayor, José Luis Abarca, ordered his police force to subdue the students. Three students were killed by the police. Forty-three others were taken off the buses and turned over to a drug gang, Guerreros Unidos, that was allied with the mayor, according to the official account.

Six weeks after the disappearance, the Mexican authorities said that the students had been taken to a garbage dump in the neighboring town of Cocula, killed and cremated in a giant pyre of wood and tires doused with gasoline.

Yet the clearest sign that the government’s version was not true came from the dump itself, according to the report.

“The students simply were not burned in that place,” said Francisco Cox, a Chilean lawyer and another member of the panel. The intense heat needed to burn 43 bodies would have blackened the surrounding vegetation, and, José Torero, a leading fire expert engaged by the panel, agreed that there was no evidence to support the government’s scenario.

The report concluded with a strong recommendation that the Mexican authorities reconsider the entire case based on the investigation’s “clear shortcomings” and “serious inconsistencies.”

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Source:Ndtv