The Mexican attorney general’s office is pursuing charges of kidnapping against the former mayor of the southern city of Iguala where 43 students went missing in September after being attacked by municipal police allegedly working with a local drug cartel.

Tomás Zerón, the head of criminal investigations at the federal prosecutor’s office, said arrest warrants for kidnapping had been obtained against the former mayor José Luis Abarca and 44 others implicated in the case that has focused attention on the entrenched corruption which has exacerbated Mexico’s security crisis.

Abarca was arrested in Mexico City in November, and is already in jail facing murder charges dating from 2013. The kidnapping warrant marks the first time he has been formally linked to the events in September in the federal investigation.

It comes on the heels of another arrest warrant issued against Abarca’s wife, along with 53 others, for organised crime based on evidence of their links to the Guerreros Unidos cartel. María de los Angeles Pineda was already being held without charge in preventive detention.

Zerón said that 97 people have been arrested so far. They include 36 municipal police officers, other municipal officials, and numerous alleged members of the Guerreros Unidos cartel.

“There is no evidence in the investigation suggesting members of the army or any other federal government security institution, had any participation at all in the disappearance of the students,” Zerón said.

Parents of the missing students have repeatedly claimed that federal forces must have been aware of the events in Iguala on the night their children disappeared, and some have alleged they were directly involved. Federal police and the Mexican army have denied any role in the disappearance.

Clashes broke out in front of the army base in Iguala on Monday as parents and other students, from the radical Ayotzinapa college where the missing had been studying, demanded to be allowed inside to look for evidence that their children had been there. On Tuesday the authorities said the parents would be allowed in at a later date, and in an orderly way.



The atrocity began with police attacks on a bus convoy full of students on 26 September. According to the investigation, many were also arrested and then handed over to members of the Guerreros Unidos cartel who massacred them and burned their bodies in a rubbish tip.

The bone fragments of one of the disappeared students have been identified among remains recovered by forensic science officials.



The attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, has previously said the initial attack was ordered by the mayor out of fear the students would disrupt an event to promote his wife’s political ambitions.

Statements by some of the drug gang members arrested claim that the students were targeted due to a mistaken belief they were linked to a rival cartel called Los Rojos.