Missing Mexican students not burned in dump: experts

By Nancy Caouette



MEXICO CITY

Forty-three missing students who disappeared almost 19 months ago in Mexico's southwestern state of Guerrero were not incinerated in a dump, a team of Argentine forensic experts said Wednesday.

The findings were published in a report on the website of the nonprofit Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), who have been helping Mexican investigators in the case from the beginning.

According to the government’s official version of events, local police abducted the students in Guerrero's Iguala city on Sept. 26, 2014.

The students were killed and burned by members of the Guerrero Unidos, or United Warriors, drug cartel at a dump in Cocula, 21 kilometers (13 miles) from Iguala.

But the EAFF team, composed of forensics, anthropologists and fire experts, said the scene of the crime in Cocula was altered several times between October 2014 and December 2015.

An examination of the evidence collected at the site does not allow the Argentine experts to conclude that the male students were burned in a massive fire.

“The analysis of the vegetation … is not consistence with the existence of a fire that could allow to burn the rest of 43 people on the night of Sept. 26 to Sept. 27, 2014, as the Mexican attorney general’s office has supposed up to this date,” the team said in the report.

The experts also suggested that the Mexican government stop investigating the Cocula dump. “It is time to search for the 43 students in others parts,” they recommended.

Argentinian forensics experts were invited by the victims’ parents to participate in the investigation.

This latest report will be presented Tuesday to Mexico’s attorney general as the EAAF team endorses conclusions made by another team of experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) who presented its initial report on the case last September. In it several similar holes were poked in the government’s investigation.

The IACHR will on April 24 present its final report on case to the government.