MEXICO CITY (AP) – The new testimony of a cooperating witness directly implicates the Mexican army in the disappearance of 43 college students in a 2014 incident that continues to haunt the country, according to a report in the newspaper on Wednesday.
The Reformation newspaper said the witness, allegedly a member of the gang identified only as “Juan,” alleges that the soldiers arrested and interrogated some students before handing them over to a gang of drug traffickers.
The bodies of the students were cremated in a local crematorium or dissolved in acidic or caustic solutions and dumped in ditches, the witness said. Other bodies were allegedly hacked and dispersed near the city of Taxco.
The revelation could further embarrass the military, which has recently been hit by allegations that a former defense secretary paid a gang of drug traffickers. It could also imply that most of the student remains could never be found.
The Interior Department confirmed that the witness was part of the case and said it would file charges against anyone who leaked it. The department did not comment on the accuracy of the newspaper’s witness version.
But a person familiar with the case said the testimony was new, since early 2020, and that it was part of the record.
The witness said an army captain, who now faces charges of organized crime in the case, detained some students at a local army base and interrogated them before handing them over to the gang. of drug traffickers Guerreros Unidos.
Police arrested another group and gang members captured others. In all, the witness said there were between 70 and 80 people arrested, handed over to the gang and murdered, because the Guerreros Unidos gang believed there were criminals from a rival group.
The indictment is one of a series of conflicting testimonies offering different versions of what happened to students at a college of rural teachers who hijacked buses when police rounded them up and turned themselves in to a gang of drug traffickers.
For more than six years of investigations, Mexican authorities have found dozens of clandestine graves and 184 bodies, but none of the students have disappeared.
According to the first investigations of the events of September 2014, the police of the city of Iguala handed over the students to the members of the cartel, who allegedly killed and burned them. However, the charred bone fragments have only been combined with two students.
Witness “Juan” allegedly told investigators that fragments of bones found around a garbage dump near Iguala were planted by the gang of drug traffickers to launch investigations.
Prosecutors once claimed the students had been burned at a huge pyre in the landfill, a version that later independent forensic experts said was not feasible.
“Juan” said some of the student’s bodies actually dissolved in caustic solutions and dumped the drains, while others were hacked and cremated at a local funeral home.
An employee of this funeral home in Iguala, known as “El Angel”, confirmed that he had crematorium facilities. It would have been a daring move that involved almost total control of the gang of drug traffickers in Iguala, because the funeral home is also the basis for the local medical office.
But there have been a number of conflicting testimonies in the case, including some allegedly extracted under torture by investigators from a previous administration.