Mexican Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam gives a press conference in Mexico City on November 7, 2014 where he announced that suspected gang members confessed to killing more than 40 missing students and incinerating their remains/AFP
MEXICO CITY, November 8 – Confessions by suspected gang members indicate 43 Mexican students missing for six weeks were killed, burned beyond recognition and tossed in a river in a case that outraged the nation, authorities said.
Facing angry protests in the biggest crisis of his administration, President Enrique Pena Nieto vowed to hunt down all those responsible for the “horrible crime.”
Authorities have been searching for the aspiring teachers since gang-linked police attacked their buses in the southern city of Iguala on September 26, allegedly under orders of the mayor and his wife in a night of terror that left six people dead.
“To the parents of the missing young men and society as a whole, I assure you that we won’t stop until justice is served,” Pena Nieto said.
If the testimonies are proven true, it would be one of the worst massacres in a drug war that has killed more than 80,000 people and left 22,000 others missing since 2006.
Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam warned that it would be difficult to identify the charred remains and that authorities will continue to consider the students as missing until DNA tests confirm the identities.
He added, however, that there was “a lot of evidence that could indicate it was them.”
– 14-hour inferno –
Three Guerreros Unidos gang members confessed to killing the male students after police handed them over between Iguala and the neighboring town of Cocula, Murillo Karam said, showing videos of the taped confessions.
The bodies were set on fire down a hill from a Cocula garbage dump with gasoline, tires, firewood and plastic, in an inferno that lasted 14 hours, he said.
“The fire lasted from midnight to 2:00 pm the next day. The criminals could not handle the bodies until 5:00 pm due to the heat,” he said.
The suspects then crushed the remains, stuffed them in bags and threw some in a river.
Murillo Karam showed videos of investigators combing through small pieces of charcoal-like remains that were found in black plastic bags. Some remains were found near the landfill.
The gang members were not sure how many students they received but one of them said there were more than 40.
Murillo Karam delivered the news to the relatives of the missing in an airport hangar in Chilpancingo, capital of the violence plagued southern state of Guerrero.
But the parents, who distrust the government, said they would not accept that their children are dead until they get a final ruling from independent Argentine forensic experts who are taking part in the investigation.
“As long as there is no proof, our sons are alive,” Felipe de la Cruz, a spokesman for the families, said at a news conference from the missing young men’s teacher training college near Chilpancingo.
Last month, two hitmen had already confessed to killing 17 of the students and dumping them in a mass grave near Iguala. But authorities said tests showed none of the 28 bodies found in the pit belonged to the students.
Murillo Karam said experts from an Austrian university would help identify the charred remains.
– Among Mexico’s ‘gravest’ crime –
Authorities have now detained 74 people, including several Guerreros Unidos members, 36 Iguala and Cocula police officers and Iguala’s ousted mayor Jose Luis Abarca and his wife Maria de los Angeles Pineda.
The mayoral couple were detained in a gritty Mexico City district on Tuesday after more than a month on the run.
About The Author
