Mexican massacre: Politician charged

MEXICO CITY: Mexico has arrested a former attorney-general after a special report implicated him, the army and police in the disappearance and massacre of 43 students eight years ago.

Jesus Murillo Karam (inset), who served as attorney-general from 2012 to 2015, was arrested on charges of “forced disappearance, torture and obstruction of justice”.

Arrest warrants also were issued for 33 army and police officials suspected of involvement along with 11 members of an organised crime group.

The arrest came a day after a commission set up to investigate the case of the missing students concluded it was a “crime of the state” involving every layer of government. Yet the report shed little light on the motives.

It revealed that police and other security forces had colluded with members of a drug gang to abduct and kill the students, young men from a teachers’ college, who were seized from a bus on their way to a demonstration in Mexico City in 2014.

The case has haunted the nation ever since.

No bodies have ever been found, though fragments of burnt bone have been matched to three of the victims.

There is no indication any of the other students are still alive, the inquiry concluded.

“All the testimonies and evidence prove they were cunningly killed and disappeared,” said Alejandro Encinas Rodriguez, the government official responsible for human rights.

Investigating the case in 2014, Murillo Karam had announced the students had been killed and their bodies burnt at a rubbish dump by a drug gang, calling this “the historic truth”.

Such crimes have proliferated in a nation plagued by a recent average of 30,000 murders a year.

Families of the students have long suspected government officials of colluding with drug traffickers in covering up the case, holding protests demanding the truth.