Report faults Mexico’s probe of 43 missing students

MEXICO CITY – An independent report presented Sunday dismantles the Mexican government’s investigation into last year’s disappearance of 43 teachers college students, starting with the assertion that the giant funeral pyre in which the attorney general said they were burned to ash beyond identification simply never happened.

While the government said the Sept. 26 attack was a case of mistaken identity, the report said it was a violent and coordinated reaction to the students, who were hijacking buses for transportation to a demonstration and may have unknowingly interfered with a drug shipment on one of the buses. Iguala, the city in southern Guerrero state where the attack took place, is known as a transport hub for heroin going to the United States, particularly Chicago, some of it by bus, the report said.

“The business that moves the city of Iguala could explain such an extreme and violent reaction and the character of the massive attack,” the experts said in the report delivered to the government and the students’ families.

The report means that nearly a year after the disappearance, the fate of 42 of the students remains a mystery, given the errors, omissions and false conclusions outlined in more than 400 pages by the experts assembled by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Only a charred bone fragment of one of the 43 has been identified and it wasn’t burned at the high temperature of an incineration, contrary to Mexican investigators’ claims.

“We have no evidence to support where the disappeared are,” said Carlos Beristain, a Spanish medical doctor on the team.

The report recommends that authorities rethink their assumptions and lines of investigation, as well as continue the search for the students and investigate the possible use of public or private ovens to cremate the bodies. It also recommends investigating the possible drug angle and who coordinated and gave the orders for the attacks.

President Enrique Pena Nieto said via his Twitter that he has given instructions for investigators to take into account the findings of the report, which dealt another blow to the Mexican government in a case that has already brought international outrage and protests.