US, European experts to probe case of missing Mexican students

Relatives of the 43 missing students from the Isidro Burgos rural teachers college march holding pictures of their missing loved ones during a protest in Mexico City, Friday, Dec. 26, 2014. Protesters marched through the city to mark the three months since the 43 students were taken by municipal police and then handed over to a drug gang to be killed and then the bodies burned, according to the results of the Attorney General’s investigation. AP

MEXICO CITY, Mexico—Mexican authorities have invited international experts from the United States, Canada and Europe to join a new investigation into whether 43 missing students were incinerated at a garbage dump last year.

READ: Mexico’s 43 missing students haunt president

Attorney General Arely Gomez said Thursday that three forensic experts from Mexico and four others from the United States, Canada, Germany and Spain will take part in the probe.

READ: Mexican government affirms that missing students burned at dump

Prosecutors say corrupt police in the southern city of Iguala attacked the students on September 26, 2014, and handed them over to the Guerreros Unidos drug gang, which killed them and burned their bodies in the nearby town of Cocula.

But independent investigators from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights concluded last month that there was no scientific evidence that the students were incinerated at the Cocula landfill.

Gomez told the Senate that her office had also invited Jose Luis Torero, a Peruvian fire expert who was cited in the report of the commission’s independent investigators.