Case of missing students: Mexico arrests ex-police chief

MEXICO CITY: Mexican authorities arrested on Friday the fugitive former police chief of the city where 43 students disappeared in the hands of officers in 2014, raising hopes of a breakthrough in the case.

Felipe Flores was detained in Iguala in an operation involving federal police, the military and the attorney-general’s office acting on an arrest warrant, the National Security Commission said on Twitter, without providing more details.

Flores was Iguala’s police chief when officers attacked dozens of students in the town on September 26, 2014, after the young men stole buses for a protest in Mexico City — a common practice among the trainee teachers in Guerrero state.

His arrest may offer new clues about the fate of the students in a case that has bedevilled President Enrique Pena Nieto’s administration for more than two years. Attorney-General Arely Gomez welcomed Flores’ capture, writing on Twitter that it will allow investigators to get “a fundamental statement to clear up the events of Iguala.”

Prosecutors have said that the police officers took 43 students and handed them over to the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel, which killed them, incinerated their bodies at a garbage dump and tossed the remains in a river.

But the government’s conclusions were rejected by independent experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, who said there was no scientific proof that the students were burned at the dump. The remains of only one student have been identified.

The attorney-general’s office has since agreed to look at other lines of investigation and conduct new searches with laser scanning technology known as Lidar, which takes thermal images of the earth to look for human remains.

More than 130 people have been arrested, including Iguala’s former mayor, his wife, several police officers and alleged members of the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel.