Government says a drug trafficker ordered the disappearance and incineration of 43 student teachers after he mistook them for a rival drug gang

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Mexican police have reportedly captured a drug trafficker who the government has said ordered the disappearance and incineration of 43 student teachers after he mistook their presence in his territory for an incursion by a rival drug gang.

Investigation into Mexico's 43 missing students dismisses official story Read more

The arrest – widely reported in local media and expected to be officially confirmed at a press conference scheduled for Thursday evening – comes at a time when the government is struggling to establish the credibility of its investigation into what happened to the students.

Local media said Gildardo Lopez, nicknamed El Gil, was arrested in the tourist town of Taxco, about 20 miles from the city of Iguala from where the teachers went missing on 26 September 2014, after being first attacked and then arrested by municipal police.

In early November the government said its investigation into what happened next had established that the police handed the students over to members of the locally-dominant Guerreros Unidos drug gang.

The gang then allegedly massacred the students in a rubbish tip where they also burned the bodies on a pyre, before collecting the remains in plastic bags that they threw in a nearby river.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest This is an 84-photo composite of people, each holding an image of their missing relative. The photographs of the 84 were shot between April and August of 2015 in the city of Iguala and surrounding towns. Photograph: Dario Lopez-Mills/AP

This version of events – dubbed by the then-attorney as “the historical truth” – is primarily based on the confessions of arrested alleged participants who said they were acting on orders from Lopez, who believed the students were linked to a rival drug gang known as Los Rojos.

The investigation also highlighted statements backing this version made by Lopez’s boss, Sidronio Casarrubias, after he was captured in October.

Casarrubias, who was far from Iguala on the night of the atrocity, said he received a Blackberry message from Lopez announcing “We are being attacked by Rojos, we are defending ourselves.”

He said Lopez then called him the following day and informed him, “We turned them into dust and threw them in the water. They will never be found.”

Parents of the missing students have always rejected any suggestion that their children could ever have been mistaken for rival criminals.

Their position has now been powerfully backed by a 560-page report released earlier this month and written by a group of independent experts assembled by the InterAmerican Commission for Human Rights.

The report pointed out that students’ movements were closely monitored by police from the moment they left their radical teacher training college in Ayotzinapa, about 90 miles from Iguala.

The police, they also stressed, were fully aware that the students’ only intention was was to commandeer passenger busses to use in a later protest.

The experts have also insisted that there is no physical evidence to support the allegation that a massive funeral pyre was constructed with the bodies in the rubbish tip that night, as well as no physical link between the dump and human remains government investigators recovered from the river.

The reported capture of Lopez, comes a day after the government announced that a specialized forensic lab in Austria that has been studying those remains has identified a possible match with Jhosivani Guerrero, one of the missing students.

Last December the lab also found a match with another of the students, Alexander Mora.

The new developments in the Iguala investigation come at a time with President Enrique Peña Nieto is facing renewed pressure over the case, sparked by the experts’s report.

He has promised to meet the parents next week, ahead of a demonstration in Mexico City on Saturday to mark the first anniversary of the events.

