Burned remains likely are 43 students missing in Mexico

MEXICO CITY – Suspects in the disappearance of 43 college students have confessed to loading the youths onto dump trucks, murdering them at a landfill, then burning the bodies and dumping the ashen remains into a river, Mexican authorities said Friday.

In a somber, lengthy explanation of the investigation, Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam played video showing hundreds of charred fragments of bone and teeth fished from the river and its banks. He said it will be very difficult to extract DNA to confirm that they are the students missing since Sept. 26 after an attack by police in the southern state of Guerrero.

“I know the enormous pain the information we’ve obtained causes the family members, a pain we all share,” Murillo Karam said at a news conference. “The statements and information that we have gotten unfortunately point to the murder of a large number of people in the municipality of Cocula.”

Some 74 people have been detained so far in the case. Authorities say it started when police, under orders of former Mayor Jose Luis Abarca and working with a drug gang, opened fire on students in the city of Iguala, where they were collecting donations and had commandeered public buses. Six people were killed in two confrontations before the 43 were taken away and handed over to members of the Guerreros Unidos cartel. Abarca and his wife are among those arrested.

Murillo Karam said authorities are searching for more suspects.

The parents, human rights groups and Mexicans in general have been appalled by the government’s slow response to a case that has exposed in the worst way decades of collusion between officials and organized crime along with government inaction. There had been accusations for more than a year that Abarca was involved in killing and disappearing rivals, but no investigation. When students who survived the Iguala confrontation sought help from the military the night of the attack, they said they were turned away.

In the most comprehensive accounting to date of the disappearances and the subsequent investigation, Murillo Karam showed videotaped confessions by those who testified they used dump trucks to carry the students to a landfill site in Cocula, a city near Iguala. About 15 of the students were already dead when they arrived at the site and the rest were shot there, according to the suspects.