Rights Experts Challenge Mexico’s Probe of Student Killings

Relatives and friends of the 43 missing missing of Ayotzinapa wait before experts of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights presented the first conclusions of their investigation, in Mexico City on Sunday. The independent probe concluded that the students could not have been incinerated in a landfill, refuting the government's official conclusion. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Group seeks new investigation; Attorney General vows to review forensics, update report

By Laurence Iliff, WSJ
Updated Sept. 6, 2015 7:21 p.m. ET

MEXICO CITY—Critical parts of Mexico’s investigation into the abduction and probable killing of 43 teaching students a year ago are being challenged by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights as seriously flawed, including the assertion that their bodies were incinerated in a garbage dump.

The report prompted Mexican officials to order a review of the official investigation.

The fate of the young students from a teachers college in the poor, southern town of Ayotzinapa has become a matter of international concern given the failure by investigators to find their bodies. It has also added to Mexico’s reputation as a place of growing violence and impunity.

Protesters in Mexico City and around the world have rallied around the phrase “It was the state,” alleging government complicity or negligence in the deaths of the Ayotzinapa students. Family members of the victims and other protesters chanted the phrase Sunday at a news conference where the team of experts appointed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights presented its findings.

Later Sunday, Attorney General Arely Gómez said her office will carry out a new forensics examination of the Cocula landfill using internationally recognized experts. She also said in a statement that investigators would determine which parts of Sunday’s report could be incorporated into the official probe. And she granted an extension of the Inter-American team’s work in Mexico.

(More here.)