Experts question report:
Argentine forensic experts who have studied a dump in southern Mexico where government officials claim the bodies of 43 missing students were burned said Saturday that results from a new investigation of the site are incomplete and inconclusive.
The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team released a statement saying the latest investigation by a team of experts “neither confirms nor denies” the official version of what happened to the students from the Rural Normal School at Ayotzinapa.
The Argentines were called in shortly after the teachers’ college students disappeared in Iguala in Guerrero state on Sept 26, 2014. An investigation by Mexico’s government concluded they were killed by a local drug gang after being confused with members of a rival group. They were purportedly taken by corrupt local police and handed over to the gang, which incinerated their bodies at a dump in the nearby town of Cocula and threw the remains into a river.
The Argentines — who were brought in at the request of the students’ families and worked with government investigators — studied the dump and said first in January 2015 and later in a full report released in February 2016 that the evidence did not support the official version of events.
In September 2015, another team of independent experts sent by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, or IACHR, released a report that dismantled the government’s investigation. The report explained how state and federal police, as well as the military, were monitoring the students’ movements before they were attacked. But no one intervened when Iguala and Cocula police attacked, killing six people and participating in the disappearance of the 43.