43 STUDENTS DISAPPEARED IN MEXICO

JTFMax:

MEXICO CITY (Mexico) - Eight years after the disappearance of 43 students in Mexico, the judiciary has brought charges against former Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam (74).

All three counts of the indictment - enforced disappearances, torture, and offenses against the administration of justice - were admitted. The Mexican judicial authorities announced this on Wednesday.

Ex-Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam has to answer in a criminal case.

Murillo Karam was arrested outside his home in the Mexican capital on Friday. At the hearing, Murillo Karam acknowledged possible mistakes, but according to media reports, he defended the results of his investigation. Accordingly, the kidnapped young men had been killed and burned in a rubbish dump.

Independent experts and, most recently, a truth commission accused Murillo Karam of falsifying evidence to be able to close the case after just four months.

Accordingly, the ex-attorney general was partly responsible for the fact that a suspected crime scene was manipulated, and torture was used to distract from the actual course of the crime. Murillo Karam wanted to establish one of his "historical truths," according to which only local politicians, police officers, and criminals were involved. Therefore, the possible involvement of the military and other authorities in the case was not investigated. In addition, witnesses were tortured.

Relatives of the missing students regularly took to the streets, as here in Mexico City in 2015

At his hearing on Wednesday, Murillo Karam defended his interpretation of what happened on the night of the crime. Some mistakes may have been made in the investigation, but the "historical truth" has never been refuted, he said, according to media reports.

Corrupt police officers abducted the students from the Ayotzinapa teacher training college in the city of Iguala on the night of September 27, 2014, and handed them over to the Guerreros Unidos criminal syndicate. However, the background of the fact has not yet been fully elucidated. 

According to a recent Truth Commission report, all students are believed to be dead. So far, however, only bone fragments from three of the young men have been found and identified.