The judiciary in Mexico on Friday demanded the arrest of 20 army officers and 44 police officers allegedly involved in the disappearance of 43 students in 2014 in Ayotchinap, the prosecution said.

The 64 police and military personnel are wanted for “organized crime, enforced disappearances, torture, murder and crimes against justice,” prosecutors said. Their identities and titles have not been revealed.

At the same time, prosecutors issued arrest warrants for 14 members of the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel.

A few hours earlier, former Mexican Justice Minister Jesús Murillo Karam had been arrested in the same case.

Murillo Karam served as Minister of Justice from 2012 to 2015 during the presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto. During this time, he led an investigation into the disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotchinapa teacher’s school in the southwestern state of Guerrero. Murillo Karam was also an important figure in the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which was in power in Mexico for 71 years, until 2000.

He is the highest-ranking official arrested so far as part of an investigation into the disappearance of 43 students, which was reopened in 2019 after Andrés Manuel López Obrador was elected President of Mexico.

These developments come after the release on Thursday of an official report that called the case a “state crime.”

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who set up the “Ayotchinapa Truth Commission” to shed light on the case, asked yesterday to “punish those responsible,” the soldiers and police involved in the disappearance of 43 students.

According to the head of the Ayotchinapa Truth Commission, Deputy Interior Minister Alejandro Encinas, these police and military officers “through their actions, inaction or their participation, allowed the disappearance and execution of students, as well as the murder of six more people from the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel.

“Revealing this horrific and inhumane situation, while at the same time punishing the perpetrators, prevents the recurrence of these shameful events” and “strengthens institutions,” said López Obrador.

“What weakens the institution is that it does not act on the basis of the truth, that there is corruption, impunity,” he added.

At the same time, Lopez Obrador stressed that he would continue to ask Israel for the extradition of the former head of the Criminal Investigation Service, Thomas Seron.

Sharon, accused of involvement in the Ayotchinap case, although he himself maintains his innocence, fled to Israel, where he applied for asylum.

Already at the end of March, Lopez Obrador announced that an investigation was underway against Navy officers who are suspected of falsifying evidence. However, he denied that the Mexican authorities were withholding important information about the case.

On the night of September 26-27, 2014, a group of students from the Ayutthaya teacher’s school went to the nearby city of Iguala (Guerrero state, south) with the intention of “demanding” buses to the capital, from where they wanted to demonstrate.

According to an initial investigation by Murillo Karam, 43 young men were arrested by police officers working with the Guerreros Unidos (“United Warriors”) drug cartel, then shot and their bodies burned because they thought they were members of a rival gang. .

The families of the victims, as well as independent experts, reject this version, which does not place any responsibility on the military.

Nearly eight years later, the remains of three victims were identified.

Another commission, set up following an agreement between Peña Nieto’s government and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleged that the military falsified evidence they found in a dump where students’ bodies were burned.

^{Sources: APE-MPE, AFP.}