Macabre details in Mexican murders
Suspects describe killing, burning of 43 students, attorney general says
MEXICO CITY— Suspects in the disappearance of 43 college students have described a macabre and complicated mass murder and incineration of the victims carried out over an entire day and ending with their ashen remains being dumped into a river, Mexican authorities said Friday.
In a sombre, lengthy explanation of the investigation, Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam played a video showing hundreds of charred fragments of bone and teeth fished from the river and its banks. He said it will be very difficult to extract DNA to confirm that they are the students missing since Sept. 26 after an attack by police in the southern state of Guerrero.
“I know the enormous pain the information we’ve obtained causes the family members, a pain we all share,” Murillo Karam said at a news conference. “The statements and information that we have gotten unfortunately points to the murder of a large number of people in the municipality of Cocula.”
Some 74 people have been detained so far in a case that prosecutors have said started when police, under orders from the mayor and working with a drug gang, opened fire on students in the city of Iguala, where they were collecting donations and had commandeered public buses. Six people were killed in two confrontations before the 43 were taken away and handed over to members of the Guerreros Unidos cartel. Murillo Karam said authorities are searching for more suspects. “As long as there are no results, our sons are alive,” Felipe de la Cruz, the father of one of the disappeared, said in a statement criticizing the federal government, who many have faulted for its false starts and slow response. “Today they’re trying to close the case this way . . . a blatant way to further our torture by the federal government.” In the most comprehensive accounting to date of the disappearances and the subsequent investigation, Murillo Karam showed videotaped confessions by those who testified to loading the students in dump trucks and carrying them to a landfill site in Cocula, a city near Iguala. Some 15 of the students were already dead when they arrived at the site and the rest were shot, according to the suspects.
They then built an enormous funeral pyre that burned from midnight until 2 or 3 p.m. along the River San Juan in Cocula. “They assigned guards in shifts to make sure the fire lasted for hours, throwing diesel, gasoline, tires, wood and plastic,” Murillo Karam said.
The suspects even burned their own clothes to destroy evidence, they said.
It was about 5:30 p.m. when the ashes had cooled enough to be handled. Those who disposed of the bodies were told to break up the burned bones, place them in black plastic garbage bags and empty them into the river.
Murillo Karam said the teeth were so badly charred that they practically dissolved into dust at the touch.
“The high level of degradation caused by the fire in the remains we found make it very difficult to extract the DNA that will allow an identification,” he said.
Murillo Karma had told relatives of the missing students earlier Friday that authorities believe their children are these charred remains, but have no DNA confirmation.