Mexican federal police take over city of 'student massacre'

Latest update : 2014-10-07

Mexico sent federal agents to take over security in a troubled city in southern Guerrero state after the discovery of a mass grave and charges that local police conspired with a criminal gang to kill and disappear students.

The newly created preventative unit of the federal police was tasked Monday with keeping order in Iguala and help search for the 43 students still missingfollowing the Sept. 26 attack, in which six people died.

As state officials worked to determine whether any of the missing were among 28 bodies found over the weekend in a clandestine hillside grave, President Enrique Pena Nieto called the deaths “outrageous, painful and unacceptable.”

Pena Nieto said he dispatched federal security forces to “find out what happened and apply the full extent of the law to those responsible.”

‘Confusing’ information

“The information coming out of this situation has been confused—the state government has announced that hit men have confessed to working with organised crime and police to murder the students and lead them to the mass grave sites, but at the same time those bodies have still not been identified and the government says the results could take between 15 days and a few months to come back. So there’s been a confession but no formal identification,” saidDeborah Bonello, FRANCE 24’s correspondent in Mexico.

Guerrero State Prosecutor Inaky Blanco said so far there was no known motive for the attack, but officials have alleged that local police were in league with a gang called the Guerreros Unidos.

Investigators said video showed officers taking away an undetermined number of students, who had gone from a rural teachers college in Ayotzinapa to the city to solicit donations.

Guerrero Gov. Angel Aguirre charged last week that the majority of police in his state have been co-opted or infiltrated by organised crime. On Monday, Iguala’s remaining police force was sent to a training centre and officers’ weapons were to be checked for evidence of being used in crimes, said National Security Commissioner Monte Alejandro Rubido.

Former anti-drug prosecutor Samuel Gonzalez said it was possible that traffickers suspected the students had been sent by a rival drug gang. However, Manuel Martinez, spokesman for the students’ families, denied they had any links to organized crime. Moreover, the Ayotzinapa school has long been an ally of community police in the nearby town of Tixtla, and Martinez said that, along with the teachers union and the students, it had formed a broad front to expel cartel extortionists from the area last year.

Authorities have presented charges against 29 people. Three suspects are fugitives, including Iguala’s police chief.

Growing violence in southern Mexico

The federal takeover came amid rising international concern over the Iguala incident and another possible case of a mass killing involving Mexican authorities.

An army unit is under investigation and three soldiers face homicide charges in a June 30 confrontation that killed 22 suspected gang members in neighbouring Mexico state. The army originally reported that they died in a gun battle after soldiers on patrol came under fire, but a witness told The Associated Press that 21 of them were killed after they surrendered.

Parts of Guerrero are controlled by vigilante-style community police forces, some believed to have ties to leftist guerrilla movements. Drug traffickers sometimes form their own pseudo-vigilante groups, and the state is torn by ancestral land conflicts, illegal logging and mining interests that create a powder keg for potential conflict.

(FRANCE 24 with AP)