Mexico, 43 students missing in 2014: former Attorney General arrested

Breakthrough in the case of the 43 Mexican students who disappeared in 2014: Police arrested former Mexico Attorney General Jesús Murillo, while a judge issued another 83 custody orders for soldiers, policemen, Guerrero state officials and members of a gang. Murillo was arrested on Friday at his home in Mexico City on charges of enforced disappearance, torture and obstruction of justice for the kidnapping and disappearance of students in the southwestern state, now considered a “state sponsored crime.” was taken to an office of the Attorney General and will be transferred to a prison in Mexico City, authorities said. During his tenure, between 2012 and 2015, under then-president Enrique Peña Nieto, Murillo supervised the highly criticized investigations into the disappearance of the students, which took place on September 26, 2014, while they were on board a direct bus from Iguala to Mexico City. International experts said the official investigation was studded with errors and abuses, including the torture of witnesses. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office in 2018 vowing to clarify the incident. The arrest of the former Attorney General, who “did not resist”, the judicial authorities reported, took place in the aftermath of the statements of Alejandro Encinas, Undersecretary for Human Rights, who called the disappearances a “state crime” involving local, state and federal officials. Murillo covered the case in 2014 and called the government’s conclusions the “historical truth. “. According to this version, a local gang of drug traffickers mistook the students for members of a rival group, killed them, burned them in a landfill and threw the remains into a river. A group of international experts instead highlighted the gaps in the report and the United Nations denounced arbitrary detentions and torture during the investigation, while Mexican investigators believe that the students – so far the remains of only three of them have been found – have been stopped by corrupt agents, who then handed them over to a drug trafficking cartel, which mistook them for members of a rival gang.