Gang member’s testimony casts further doubt on fate of 43 Mexico students

While Mexican prosecutors declared last year that 43 missing students were incinerated at a landfill, official documents published show that one gang suspect testified that at least nine were slaughtered elsewhere. Mexico’s attorney general office posted on its website the 54,000 pages of documents from the much-criticized investigation into a case that has bedevilled President Enrique Pena Nieto’s administration. A review by AFP of hundreds of pages found contradictory testimony among some of the more than 100 suspects who have been detained, including Guerreros Unidos drug cartel members and municipal police officers.

They left the four others tied up. They had beaten them and left the unconscious.

Gang member Marco Antonio Rios Berber

Former attorney general Jesus Murillo Karam said police officers abducted 43 students in September 2014 and handed them over to the Guerreros Unidos drug gang, which confused them with rivals, killed them and incinerated their bodies at a garbage dump in the neighboring town of Cocula. The newly released documents include the testimony of Marco Antonio Rios Berber, a confessed member of the Guerreros Unidos, who said 13 students were taken to a hill on the outskirts of Iguala, where at least nine were killed. Last month, independent experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights tore apart the official investigation. They said there was no scientific evidence that the 43 students were burned to ashes at the landfill. DNA tests showed none belonged to the students but rather to victims from other cases.

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