Former AG in Mexico charged with mishandling investigation into disappearance of 43 students

Federal prosecutors on Fridaysaid Mexico's The former administration's attorney general has been arrested.

Jesús Murillo Calam served as Attorney General from 2012 until 2015, under then-President Enrique Peña Nieto. The office of the current Attorney General, Alejandro Gertz Manero, said Murillo Karam was charged with torture, official misconduct and enforced disappearance.

In 2020, Gertz Manero said Murillo Karam "engineered a massive media ruse" and led a "generalized cover-up" in the incident.

The arrest came the day after a commission was set up to determine what happened, with the military at least partially responsible. Soldiers infiltrated a group of students involved and said the military did not stop the kidnappings even though they knew what was going on.

Iguala, Guerrero State In the city, members of corrupt local police, security forces, and drug cartels kidnapped students, the motives of which remained unclear eight years later. Their bodies have never been found, butcharred bone fragments were found among three students. Matches things.

Murillo Karam, under pressure to quickly resolve the case, announced that in 2014, members of a drug cartel killed students and burned their bodies in a garbage dump. . He called the hypothesis "historical truth."

However, the investigation included cases of torture, improper arrests, and improper handling of evidence, so direct Most of the gang members involved were free to act.

The incident occurred near a large army base, and an independent investigation found that military members It turns out that he knew who he was. Families of students have long called for military personnel to be included in investigations.

On Thursday, the Truth Commission investigating the case said one of the kidnapped students was a soldier who had infiltrated a radical teacher training school, but the military said it had real-time information. that a kidnapping had taken place that resulted in no search for him, even though he had It said it violated military protocol in the case of missing soldiers.

The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party, to which both Murillo Karam and Peña Nieto belonged, wrote on its Twitter account that Murillo Karam's arrest was "a matter of politics rather than justice. It will not help the victims' families get." to answer.

Mexican federal prosecutors previously issued arrest warrants for members of the military and federal police, as well as for Tomás Xelón, who was head of the Mexican detective agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, at the time of the abduction.

Zellon is under investigation for charges of torture and cover-up of enforced disappearance. He fled to Israel and Mexico enlisted the Israeli government to arrest him.

Gertz Manero, in addition to Zeron's alleged crimes, in this case, he was deported from the Attorney General's budget. allegedly stole more than $44 million from

The motive for the student abduction remains a matter of debate.

Murillo Karam claimed that the students were handed over to drug gangs who killed them, incinerated the bodies at the nearby Kocula dump, and threw the pieces of burned bones into the river. .

Subsequent investigations by independent experts and the Attorney General's Office, corroborated by the Truth Commission, rejected the notion that the bodies were cremated at the Kocula dump.

There is no evidence that the student is still alive.

• Mexico
• Missing Persons
• Central America
• Crime