{Authorities said Sunday they have so far uncovered 28 badly charred bodies from mass graves discovered in Iguala in southwest Mexico, with the remains of dozens of students who went missing in the city a week ago likely to be among them.}
Police and local authorities are suspected of conspiring to carry out the students’ massacre, Guerrero state Attorney General Inaky Blanco said in a televised news conference.
Blanco said that the corpses were too badly damaged for immediate identification and that genetic testing of the remains could take two weeks to two months.
However, “it is probable” that some of the missing students are among the remains found in the six graves, discovered on the outskirts of the city on Saturday, he said.
Blanco told reporters that bodies were set on fire after being heaped on top of branches which were likely doused with gasoline or diesel.
He said that 29 suspects have been identified so far, 26 of whom have been arrested, including Felipe Flores, the head of security for Iguala.
Blanco said local police had been infiltrated by a criminal gang known as the Guerreros Unidos, and that Flores had conspired with a gang leader to order the killings of the students.
He added that Francisco Salgado, Flores’s deputy, also ordered the police to detain the students and has gone missing.
Police ‘handed students to gang members’
Police are suspected of abducting some of the students, a local security official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“You really can’t call them police,” the state security official said.
Suspected gang members had told investigators that police had handed over the students to the people who killed them, who belonged to the gang, he added. The suspected gang members had also helped the authorities identify the site, he said.
Soldiers and police had cordoned off the dirt track where it ended not far from the graves, which lay about a 40-minute walk across rocky terrain inaccessible by vehicle.
The fugitive mayor of Iguala, Jose Luis Abarca, is also being investigated for possible involvement in the crimes, Blanco said.
As investigators worked at the grave site, up to 2,000 protesters blocked a main highway in the state capital of Chilpancingo demanding justice. “You took them alive, we want them returned alive,” read a huge banner hung across the road linking Mexico City and Acapulco.
Jesus Lopez, an Acapulco street vendor whose 19-year-old son Giovani is among the missing, said he hoped the remains weren’t those of the students.
Other relatives “told us that (the remains) were burned, and that they couldn’t be the kids,” Lopez said. “But we’re really nervous.”
The students, from the Aytozinapa Normal teachers college, had been in Iguala to protest against what they claimed are discriminatory hiring practices for teachers that favour urban students over rural ones.
State prosecutors have said the first bloodshed occurred when city police shot at buses that had been hijacked by protesting students from a teachers college, killing three youths and wounding 25.
A few hours later, unidentified masked gunmen shot at two taxis and a bus carrying a soccer team on the main highway, killing two people on the bus and one in a taxi.
Violence is frequent in Guerrero, a southern state where poverty feeds social unrest and drug gangs clash over territory.
The missing students attended the Aytozinapa Normal school, which, like many other schools in Mexico’s “rural teachers college” system, is known for militant and radical protests that often involve hijacking buses and delivery trucks.
Some 22 police have been arrested in connection with the September 26 violence, the motives for which remain unclear.
(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS, AP)
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