Mexican authorities arrested on Friday Mexico’s former attorney general Jesús Murillo in relation to the disappearance of 43 students in 2014, placing troops to guard the government office in Mexico City where he was held after his arrest.
Murillo, who cooperated without resistance, would later be moved to a jail in Mexico City.
Murillo was arrested on charges of forced disappearance, torture, and obstruction of justice in the abduction and disappearance of the student-teachers from the Ayotzinapa rural teachers’ college in the south-western state of Guerrero on 26 September 2014.
He’s the most prominent individual held so far in the notorious case Guerrero case that has haunted the country ever since and has now been branded as a state-sponsored crime by Mexico’s top human rights official, Alejandro Encinas, who noted the case involves local, state, and federal officials.
Encinas stressed during a news conference that the highest echelons of Peña Nieto’s administration orchestrated a cover-up, altered crime scenes, and hid links between authorities and criminals.
The attorney general’s office said that several hours after Murillo’s arrest, a judge released 83 more arrest warrants for soldiers, police officers, Guerrero officials, and gang members in relation to the case.
During his 2012-2015 term under then-president Enrique Peña Nieto, Murillo oversaw the highly criticized official investigation into the disappearance of the students that, according to international experts, was riddled with errors and abuses, including the torture of witnesses.
Many questions have remained unanswered ever since, especially regarding the remains of students, only three of which were ever found and identified.
The outgoing Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador won the elections in 2018 promising to clear up what had happened. For the last two years, his administration is also trying to arrest Tomas Zeron, another top former official connected with the case, even asking Israel to extradite him las year.
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