At least six people killed and at least 20 students ‘disappeared’ by police in Iguala believed to be controlled by drug cartel

The search continued on Tuesday for dozens of students missing since municipal police and unidentified gunmen opened fire on a convoy of buses in the southern Mexican city of Iguala over three days before.

The original list of 57 people reported missing seemed set to drop by at least 14 during the day, following reports that some students were contacting friends and relatives after spending days lying low from fear. A government official in southern Mexico said 14 of the 57 students reported missing after the weekend shootings had been located. The majority, however, remain unaccounted for, including some 20 students who were reportedly arrested but have not been located in any detention facility. Why the students were attacked is still unclear.

“Every hour that passes without them reappearing is very worrying,” said Vidulfo Rosales, a lawyer from Tlachinollan, a local human rights group supporting the students. “More efforts need to be made to find them.”

The attacks on the students were part of a string of violent events on Friday night in Iguala, in Guerrero state, which left six people dead and more injured. Along with other recent events elsewhere in Guerrero – including the assassination of a party political boss in a well-known restaurant in Acapulco on Sunday and the murder of five people in one of the city’s poor barrios on Monday – the impression is growing that the state, long in a state of conflict, is being pushed over the edge.

“What is happening is very serious,” said Samuel González, a security expert and former drug tsar. “But what we are seeing at the moment is still just the symptoms. We don’t know what the sickness is yet.”

The students, who come from a famously radical teacher training college, had gone to Iguala on Friday to collect money to fund forthcoming protests against what they say are discriminatory hiring practices for teachers that favour urban students over rural ones. Later the students said they tried to hitchhike back to their college but the police said they commandeered three buses from the terminal soon after dark to leave town.

Municipal police pursuing the convoy reportedly fired on the buses during the chase, but the attack intensified when the buses stopped and some of the unarmed students got out. Tlachinollan says many fled, but about 20 were driven away in patrol cars.

About three hours later, a number of students had returned to the scene of the attack and were talking to local reporters when they began to hear gunfire coming their way.

“We ran in the other direction,” one witness, who identified himself only by the name Ángel, told Radio Formula. “You could hear cries and moans and the bursts of gunfire that kept going.”

Two students died and one was left in a vegetative state following the two attacks. The body of a third student was found dumped nearby later, his face reportedly skinned and his eyes gouged out.

In the meantime, unidentified gunmen had also attacked a bus carrying a teenage football team called the Avispones de Chilpancingo, leaving the city after a match. One player and the driver died.

“We thought somebody was letting off fireworks at first, with the bangs and the flashes from the machine guns lighting up the darkness,” the team’s trainer, Facundo Serrano, told the newspaper Milenio.

The sixth victim in Iguala was a woman in a taxi.

Iguala lies in a strategic important valley that links different parts of the state, as well as serving as a gateway to the notoriously lawless Tierra Caliente (Hot Lands) region.

The city is described by observers as within the territory of a criminal group known as Guerreros Unidos, one of a number formed after the Beltrán Leyva drug cartel splintered in 2010. Such groups often exercise significant control over police in their territories, particularly municipal forces.

On Tuesday, the state government charged 22 municipal police officers with murder. The state prosecutor, Iñaki Blanco, has indicated that a charge of “forced disappearance” could also follow.