Mexico attorney general says 43 missing students are killed

Mexico's attorney general has declared there is evidence that all the 43 students who disappeared in the southern state of Guerrero in September last year are dead, prompting the anger of victim families.

Jesus Murillo Karam argued on Tuesday that his team had interviewed 99 individuals, including members of a criminal gang thought to have murdered the students.

"The evidence allows us to determine that the students were kidnapped, killed, burned and thrown in the river," said Murillo.

He added that the evidence of gas, diesel and burnt rocks and steel remnants from burnt tires at the river site proved the doomed fate of the victims.

The parents of the victims, however, reacted angrily to Murillo’s announcement, saying that without proof, they would continue to believe their children were still alive.

"We don't believe anything of what they say," said Carmen Cruz, whose 19-year-old son Jorge is among the disappeared students. "We are not going to allow this case to be closed."

Moreover, the attorney representing the victim families, Vidulfo Rosales, offered a 10-point argument on why the criminal probe into the mass killing should continue.

The families insist that there has been a lack of conclusive forensic results.

Rosales also reiterated that a number of key suspects remained at large and that they could shed more light into the official version of events if captured.

This is while Murillo explained that his information was based on 386 statements from interviewees, 16 police raids and two reconstructions.

He also noted that his team of investigators had 39 confessions from police officers and members of the gang.

The Mexican attorney general further underlined that the government’s key witness was Felipe Rodriguez Salgado, a member of the criminal gang that allegedly played a role in the kidnapping and the murder of the Mexican students.

The remains of only one of the students, identified as Alexander Mora, were earlier identified after his badly burnt bones were sent to a laboratory in Austria for DNA analysis.

The laboratory, however, announced that it was not possible to identify any others due to the bad condition of the remains said to belong to them.

Mora was among a group of Mexican students who travelled to the nearby town of Iguala on September 26 and, as part of a protest effort, commandeered a number of buses. On the return trip back to their college, the students were intercepted by local police officers allegedly on the orders of the town’s mayor. Murillo has argued that the police officers then handed the students over to a criminal drug gang who mistook them for a rival gang and executed them.

MFB/HJL

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