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Former Prosecutor of Mexico: Jesús Murillo Karam
Photo: OMAR TORRES / AFP
The case of the 43 missing students has occupied Mexico for almost eight years.
Now there is new movement in the investigation: The country's former Attorney General, Jesús Murillo Karam, has been arrested.
The police have executed an arrest warrant against the former top investigator, the Attorney General said on Friday.
Jesús Murillo Karam was responsible for the initial investigation into the case in 2014.
Only on Thursday did a truth commission accuse the authorities of having falsified evidence to cover up the truth.
Murillo Karam has been charged with "enforced disappearances," torture and crimes against the administration of justice, the statement said.
He was arrested at his residence in Mexico City and did not resist.
Kidnapped by the police and handed over to the cartel
Corrupt police officers kidnapped the students from the left-leaning Ayotzinapa teacher training college in Iguala in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero in September 2014 while they were on their way to a demonstration and handed them over to the Guerreros Unidos crime syndicate.
To date, only the remains of three victims have been identified.
Also against soldiers and employees of other authorities is determined.
The background of the fact is still not fully elucidated.
The ex-Attorney General Murillo Karam is considered the architect of the so-called "historical truth", the official statement on the background of the crime presented in 2015 under the then President Enrique Peña Nieto.
According to the initial investigations led by Murillo Karam, the students had been killed and burned in a rubbish dump.
complicity of officials
However, the families of the students and independent experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights doubt the official results of the investigation.
A truth commission set up in 2019 by Nieto's successor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, concluded in a report presented on Thursday that soldiers and officials were complicit in the students' disappearances.
"Your actions, omissions or involvement made possible the disappearance and execution of the students and the murder of six other people," said Ayotzinapa Truth Commission head Alejandro Encinas at the presentation of the report.
He spoke of a "state crime."
President López Obrador then demanded that the truth be known and that those responsible should be "punished".
The Attorney General will continue to work to bring those responsible to justice.
"We said from the beginning that we tell the truth, no matter how painful it may be," added López Obrador.
col/AFP/dpa