Federal prosecutors have arrested the former Mexican Attorney General on suspicion of abuse in an investigation into the disappearance of 43 students in 2014.
Jesús Murillo Calam served as Attorney General from 2012 to 2015 under then-President Enrique Peña Nieto.
The office of current Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero said he was charged with torture, official misconduct, and enforced disappearance.
In 2020, Gerts Manero said Murillo Karam had “engineered a massive media trick” and spearheaded a “generalized cover-up” of the incident.
The arrest, a day after a commission was set up to determine what happened, said the military was at least partially responsible for the incident.
Soldiers infiltrated a student group involved and said the military did not stop the kidnappings even though they knew what was going on.
In the city of Iguala, Guerrero state, corrupt local police, security forces and members of a drug gang kidnapped students in a motive that remains unclear eight years later.
Their bodies have never been found, but burnt bone fragments match those of the three students.
Pressed to quickly resolve the case, Murillo Karam announced in 2014 that members of a drug gang had killed students and burned their bodies in a garbage dump.
He called the hypothesis “historical truth.”
However, the investigation included cases of torture, improper arrests, and improper handling of evidence, so most of the gang members directly involved were free to roam.
The incident occurred near a large army base, and an independent investigation found that members of the military were aware of what was happening.
Families of students have long called for military personnel to be included in investigations.
The Truth Commission investigating the case said on Thursday that one of the abducted students was a soldier who had infiltrated a radical teacher training school, but the military had no real-time information that abductions were taking place. I didn’t search for him, even though I had
It said it violated military protocol regarding the missing soldier case.
The Ministry of Defense did not respond to a request for comment.
The Institutional Revolutionary Party, to which both Murillo Karam and Pena Nieto belong, said Murillo Karam’s arrest was “more a matter of politics than justice. will not.”
Mexican federal prosecutors had previously issued arrest warrants for members of the military and federal police, as well as for Thomas Xeron, who was head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mexico’s detective agency, at the time of the abduction.
Mr. Zellon is under investigation for charges of torture and covering up an enforced disappearance. He fled to Israel and Mexico enlisted the Israeli government to arrest him.
