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MEXICO CITY, Aug. 20 (AP) — Federal prosecutors said they arrested the former attorney general of Mexico’s government, apparently for mishandling his investigation into the disappearance of 43 students at a radical teacher training college in 2014.
Jesus Murillo Karam was attorney general from 2012 to 2015 under then-President Enrique Peña Nieto.
In 2020, the current attorney general, Alejando Gertz Manero, accused Murillo Karam of “orchestrating a massive media trick” in the case and causing the “Full Coverage”.
Friday’s arrest came a day after a committee was formed to determine what happened, saying the military was at least partially responsible for the case.
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It said a soldier had infiltrated the concerned student group and even though the army knew what was going on, the kidnapping was not prevented.
Corrupt local police, other security forces and members of drug gangs kidnapped the students in the city of Iguala, in the state of Guerrero, although their motives remain unclear eight years later.
Under pressure to solve the case quickly, Murillo Karam announced in 2014 that the students had been killed by members of a drug gang and their bodies burned in a dump. He called this assumption “historical truth.”
But the investigation includes incidents of torture, wrongful arrests and mishandling of evidence that have allowed most of the gang members directly implicated to go unpunished.
The incident took place near a large army base and an independent investigation found members of the military knew what was going on. Families of students have long called for soldiers to be included in the investigation.
On Thursday, the truth commission investigating the case said one of the kidnapped students was a soldier who infiltrated the radical teacher training college, and that the army had not searched for him despite real-time information indicating the kidnapping took place. It said the inaction violated the army’s protocol on cases of missing soldiers.
The Defense Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Federal prosecutors in Mexico had previously issued arrest warrants for the military and federal police, as well as for Tomás Zeron, who was the head of Mexico’s detective agency, the Federal Investigative Service, at the time of the kidnapping.
Zeron is being pursued on charges of torture and covering up enforced disappearances. He fled to Israel, and Mexico has asked the Israeli government for help in his arrest.
In addition to Zeroon’s alleged crimes in connection with the case, Gertz Manero said he was also suspected of stealing more than $44 million from the Attorney General’s office’s budget.
The motive for kidnapping students remains a topic of debate.
On 26 September 2014, local police in Iguala, members of organized crime and authorities kidnapped 43 students from a bus. Students regularly commandeer buses as their means of transportation.
Murillo Karam claimed the students were handed over to a drug gang who killed them, burned their bodies at a dump in nearby Cocula and dumped the burned remains into the river.
Subsequent investigations by the independent expert and the Attorney General’s Office, confirmed by the truth commission, dismissed claims that the bodies were incinerated at the Cocula dump, although recovered burnt bone fragments have been used to identify the three missing students.
There is no evidence that any of the students may still be alive. (Associated Press)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from the Syndicated News feed, the body of the content may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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