After criticism over case of missing 43 students, attorney general says team lacks required knowledge
MEXICO CITY — The office of Mexico’s attorney general yesterday launched an attack on assertions by an Argentine-led team of forensics experts who a day earlier expressed doubts about the government’s conclusion that 43 missing college students were all killed and their bodies burned.
The Argentine Forensic Anthropologists team has suggested that the Mexican government made errors in developing the genetic profiles of 16 relatives and failed to properly secure crime scenes.
The attorney general’s office shot back yesterday with a statement that declared the Argentine team was not sufficiently specialized enough to question its investigation.
“The reports (of the attorney general’s office) are valid and (the Argentine team’s) opinions with respect to other disciplines would appear to be more speculations than certainties,” the statement said.
Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam said last month that municipal police in Iguala detained the students on September 26, then turned them over to the Guerreros Unidos cartel, which killed them, burned their bodies at a garbage dump near Cocula and threw the remains in a river. The Argentine team said the Mexican government presented biased analyses of the evidence to support its conclusion. The independent investigators said they did not rule out the possibility that some students were killed as described by the government, but they did not find scientific evidence in the Cocula garbage dump to support it.
They also said they had found human remains at the dump that were not the students, indicated by dental prosthetics that none of the students had. The attorney general’s office said that evidence is still being studied and that neither the families nor the Argentine team had provided medical, physical or dental records of the students.
‘Unacceptable’
“It is unacceptable that in the face of the accumulation of evidence, forensics, confessions, statements and investigations, they try to sow doubt that in this place about 40 people were killed and incinerated, corroborated by materials and scientific examinations carried out there by the attorney general’s office,” the statement said.
So far, only one student has been identified through DNA — 19-year-old Alexander Mora.
The Argentine team said that government forensic experts made errors in developing the genetic profiles from blood samples taken by family members. The attorney general’s office said yesterday there was just one “administrative error of transcription,” which was corrected and did not affect the outcome of sophisticated tests carried out in Innsbruck, Austria.
The attorney general declared yesterday that the investigation had been carried out with “transparency and professionalism” — attributes the families of the victims reject — and said the remains found had “fully proven” to be those of the students, saying any differing opinion was “far removed from reality.”
Murillo Karam also criticized the Argentine team for not being present during the initial recovery of the bag containing the bone fragments at the San Juan river in October.
Speaking in Mexico City at an event, a spokesman for the parents of the students said “the historical truth of the Attorney falls apart” with regard to the allegations, and even expressed their fears for the safety of Argentine specialists. Felipe de la Cruz, one of the parents of the missing students, reiterated the group’s lack of trust in the authorities and said the attorney general’s reaction had “strengthened” the position of the families.
Bodies at crematorium
More than 100 people have come forward to ask if one of the 60 bodies found at an abandoned crematorium last week in Acapulco is a relative, the top prosecutor in the southern state of Guerrero said yesterday.
An anonymous tip led authorities to 60 embalmed bodies inside the crematorium on Thursday.
State prosecutor Miguel Angel Godinez said investigators are talking with more than a dozen funeral homes that used the crematorium, confirming that 107 people have made contact with officials with doubts.
Source:Buenos Aires Herald