Mexican authorities issued dozens of arrest warrants for policemen and soldiers who may have been involved in the disappearance of 43 students in 2014, the prosecutor Omar Gomez, who led the investigation, said.
A protest in Mexico against the inactivity of the authorities on missing students
/PAP / EPA
The case of the disappearance of students, who were most likely murdered, shocked the country and drew indignation and criticism from the international community on the previous government.
Gomez, head of the special prosecution unit dealing with the case, said in a press conference that the warrants were issued against the “material and intellectual perpetrators” of the crime, including military and federal and city police officers. The announcement of this information took place at the headquarters of the federal authorities in the National Palace in Mexico City on the 6th anniversary of the kidnapping of students. The ceremony was attended by the country’s president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Alejandro Encinas, deputy secretary for human rights, and relatives of the likely victims who kept their portraits.
“Warrants for the arrest of soldiers have been issued. There will be no impunity; the one whose involvement (in the crime) has been proven will be judged” – Obrador emphasized during the presentation of the report on the progress of the investigation.
Reuters points out that Mexican authorities have issued arrest warrants for military personnel for the first time since the students went missing. The Mexican military did not respond to requests for comment.
In 2015, independent experts questioned the previous government’s 2014 version of events. It shows that on the night of September 26-27, 2014, students went missing after clashes with local police during a demonstration in the city of Iguala in the state of Guerrero in south-east Mexico, and so far have not been found. Corrupt police were to hand them over to members of a drug gang, who murdered the students, burned the bodies in a garbage dump near Iguala, and scattered the remains in a nearby river.
In May 2018, a Mexican federal court ordered the establishment of an independent Commission of Investigation for Truth and Justice to investigate the missing student cases, claiming serious flaws in the prosecution’s investigation. The court found that the investigation was protracted, biased, most likely torture was used to obtain confessions, and there was no investigation of threads of the military or federal police complicity in the crime.
The case of missing students has become one of the most serious crises that the government of the former president and head of the Mexican government, Enrique Pen Nieto, faced. His successor, Obrador, at the end of 2018 led to the creation of a commission to investigate the course of the investigation, and since then has regularly announced the next steps an investigation of officials in a previous investigation. The Obrador also criticized the release from detention of some of the suspects in the case, including the main suspect.
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