A man sits on a bench next to a police officer in riot gear, during a protest for the disappearance of 43 missing students from a rural teachers college, During a march in Mexico City, Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2015. Protest marches in Mexico Were planned to mark the eleventh month since the disappearance of the students in southern Guerrero state. The federal prosecutor Said The students have Were Detained by the local police and handed over to a drug gang, who killed them and burned Their bodies. AP
MEXICO CITY — Federal authorities captured a suspected high-ranking drug cartel member who has been implicated in last year’s disappearance of 43 college students in the southern state of Guerrero, officials said Thursday.
State prosecutor Miguel Angel Godinez Munoz announced the arrest of Gildardo Lopez Astudillo in a statement, and National Security Commissioner Renato Sales later confirmed the detention.
Sales called Lopez Astudillo, 36, the “intellectual author” of the students’ disappearance. He was arrested Wednesday in the city of Taxco and is suspected of involvement in drug distribution, extortion and organized crime.
In November, then Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said it was Lopez Astudillo who informed his drug gang boss, Sidronio Casarrubias Salgado, that rivals were causing trouble in the city of Iguala. Casarrubias allegedly instructed him to defend their turf.
The government’s investigation maintains that local police in Iguala illegally detained the students from the Rural Normal School of Ayotzinapa on Sept. 26, 2014, and turned them over to the Guerreros Unidos gang. Authorities say they were killed and incinerated at a garbage dump.
A recent report presented by a group of independent investigators has discredited many aspects of the official inquiry, such as discounting the possibility that the bodies were burned on a giant pyre at the dump.
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