2023-06-27 04:43:00
A Mexican federal judge on Monday remanded eight military personnel suspected of being involved in the disappearance of 43 students in 2014, the government announced. They are charged ‘for the crime of enforced disappearance’.
The arrests of the eight servicemen come a week following Mexico’s attorney general’s office reactivated 16 arrest warrants for members of the military, which had been issued in September 2022 and then canceled.
They also come almost a month before the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), a body created in 2015 by an agreement between the Mexican government and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), presents the conclusions. of its investigation at the end of July, indicated Carlos Beristain, member of the GIEI.
At the end of March, the experts of the GIEI had already denounced an obstruction of the Mexican army which, according to them, deliberately conceals information on the disappearance of the 43 students. “It is unacceptable for us”, commented Mr. Beristain, who claims to have evidence.
Prosecutor arrested
On the night of September 26 to 27, 2014, 43 students from a normal school in Ayotzinapa, in the state of Guerrero (south), disappeared in Iguala. They had tried to ‘requisition’ buses there to demonstrate in Mexico City.
According to the official version at the time, they were arrested by police in collusion with drug traffickers from the Guerreros Unidos cartel, who took them for members of a rival gang and executed them. So far, only the remains of three victims have been identified.
But the GIEI, like the families of the victims, rejected the conclusions of this first investigation, led at the time by the former attorney general Jesus Murillo Karam, who does not attribute any responsibility to the soldiers. Mr. Murillo Karam has since been arrested in August 2022 for ‘enforced disappearance, torture and obstruction of justice’.
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