Students who disappeared in Mexico in 2014: the former attorney general arrested, 64 police officers and soldiers wanted

Mexico's former attorney general, Jesus Murillo Karam, was arrested at his Mexico City home on Friday amid arrest warrants for 20 army officials and 44 police officers, for the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from the Normal School of Ayotzinapa, located in the south of the country.

On Thursday, a report by an official commission was published, calling the case a "state crime".

During his arrest on Friday evening for "enforced disappearance, torture and offenses against the administration of justice", the former attorney general did not put up any resistance, the prosecution said in a press release.

The 64 police and military, whose identity and rank has not been specified, are wanted for "organized crime, enforced disappearance, torture, homicide and offenses against the administration of justice", adds the prosecution.

In office under the orders of President Enrique Peña Nieto from 2012 to 2018, Jesus Murillo Karam led a controversial first investigation into these disappearances and is a former heavyweight of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which governed Mexico for 71 years without interruption. until 2000. In addition to the former attorney general and the 64 police and military officers, the prosecution also issued arrest warrants against 14 members of the drug trafficking cartel Guerreros Unidos.

The remains of three identified students

On the night of September 26 to 27, 2014, a group of students from the teacher training school in Ayotzinapa, in the southern state of Guerrero, traveled to the nearby town of Iguala to " requisition” buses in order to go to Mexico City for a demonstration.

According to the investigation, 43 young people were arrested by local police in collusion with Guerreros Unidos, then shot and burned in a landfill for reasons that remain unclear.

Only the remains of three of them could be identified.

In the official report published Thursday by the “Ayotzinapa Truth Commission” set up by Mr. Lopez Obrador, part of the responsibility is attributable to the Mexican military.

“Their actions, omissions or participation enabled the disappearance and execution of the students, as well as the murder of six other people,” Interior Undersecretary Alejandro Encinas said.

Another commission, the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), which was created under an agreement between the Peña Nieto government and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), maintains that soldiers falsified evidence found in the dump where the bodies were burned.

A first investigation clearing the military

The first official investigation, led by Mr. Murillo Karam and whose conclusions were rejected by the families of the victims and by independent experts, attributed no responsibility to the military and accused a cartel of drug traffickers of having had the students killed in mistaking them for members of a rival gang.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador has said he will continue to press Israel for the extradition of the former head of the Attorney General's Office's Criminal Investigations Agency, Tomas Zeron.

Accused of being involved in the Ayotzinapa affair but claiming his innocence, this former senior official fled to Israel where he requested asylum.