Mexico widens search for 43 missing students
17 Oct 2014 5:49 AM IST
The stepped-up hunt was ordered after investigators determined that 28 sets of human remains recovered from a mass grave discovered outside Iguala last weekend were not those of any of the youths who haven’t been seen since being confronted by police in that city September 26.
Forensics examinations were focusing on a second set of clandestine graves and a third site where another burial pit was found this week. A federal official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to reveal the information, said another such site was found Wednesday near Iguala and experts were working to determine its extent.
The digging that continued Wednesday threatened to reveal even greater horrors in the gang-controlled countryside of the southern state of Guerrero. Each search has turned up more hidden graves, raising the question of how many people have been secretly killed by the area’s drug gangs, apart from those kidnapped.
The hillsides that ring Iguala could become a moral swamp for the government, much like the mass graves discovered in northern Mexico in 2010 that revealed a level of almost unheard-of brutality.
‘These lamentable acts are a moment that puts to the test the country’s institutions,’ President Enrique Pena Nieto said of the Iguala case in a speech.
From the beginning, there were signs that the first mass grave site, found just a few days after the students disappeared, might have contained the bodies of earlier victims.
Forensics examinations were focusing on a second set of clandestine graves and a third site where another burial pit was found this week. A federal official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to reveal the information, said another such site was found Wednesday near Iguala and experts were working to determine its extent.
The digging that continued Wednesday threatened to reveal even greater horrors in the gang-controlled countryside of the southern state of Guerrero. Each search has turned up more hidden graves, raising the question of how many people have been secretly killed by the area’s drug gangs, apart from those kidnapped.
The hillsides that ring Iguala could become a moral swamp for the government, much like the mass graves discovered in northern Mexico in 2010 that revealed a level of almost unheard-of brutality.
‘These lamentable acts are a moment that puts to the test the country’s institutions,’ President Enrique Pena Nieto said of the Iguala case in a speech.
From the beginning, there were signs that the first mass grave site, found just a few days after the students disappeared, might have contained the bodies of earlier victims.
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