In Case Of 43 Missing Students, Panel Urges Search Of New Locations

A group of five independent experts has called on the Mexican government to search two new locations for the missing students and open new lines of inquiry. The group is also urging the government to investigate attempts at coercion toward the students’ relatives.

MEXICO CITY — A group of independent experts has asked the Mexican government to open new lines of inquiry and search two additional locations for the 43 missing students.

The government must also search for other mass graves in the area where the students were last seen, provide sharper satellite images of the trash dump where it has centered its investigation, and protect the families of the disappeared students from being revictimized, the group said, adding that they had confidential information about attempts at coercion toward relatives.

"The safety and dignity of the relatives must be protected, so the Group requests of those who have revictimized them to abstain and asks that these events are investigated, given that they generate confusion and a new psychological impact for the families," said the commission members during a press conference on Monday, though they did not provide additional details on these events.

Aldo Gutierrez, one of the students who was injured during the attack in September and remains in grave condition, should be treated adequately and promptly, the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts, or GIEI, also said.

On Sept. 26, a group of teacher trainees who were commandeering passenger buses to transport them to a march commemorating the 1968 student massacre were ambushed by local police in Iguala, in the southwestern state of Guerrero. According to the government's official chronology, the police handed the students over to a local criminal organization, who incinerated the young men on a pyre that burned through the night, collected their ashes and bones into plastic bags, and dumped them into a local river.

The attorney general's office, which was criticized for handling the investigation with opacity and treating the missing students' families brusquely, essentially shut down the investigation in January after detaining nearly 100 people in connection to the mass kidnapping. Only one student has been positively identified and parents do not trust the government's investigation.

After the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights ordered Mexican authorities to conduct a thorough investigation of the disappearance, the government requested international assistance.

The GIEI, comprised of three lawyers, one judge, and a doctor from Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, and Spain, was created in November. It released its second report on the case on Monday in Mexico City after going through almost 80,000 pages pertaining to the case docket and traveling to Iguala with surviving students to reconstruct the siege. During the press conference, the experts said they are analyzing a constitutional reform on forced disappearances that Congress supplied.

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