President: Ayotzinapa prosecutor quit over differences with Mexican AG
Mexico City, Sep 27 (EFE).- The prosecutor investigating the abduction and murder eight years ago of 43 students from Ayotzinapa teacher’s college in the southern state of Guerrero resigned due to disagreements with the Mexican Attorney General’s Office (FRG), President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Tuesday.
“The prosecutor left because he was not in accord with the procedures followed to approve the arrest warrants, there were differences over that,” the president said of Omar Gomez Trejo’s decision to step away from the case.
Gomez Trejo, who was put in charge of the Ayotzinapa probe in June 2019, submitted his resignation after people in the FRG – acting without consulting the prosecutor – rescinded 21 arrest warrants that he had issued.
The prosecutor, who is trusted by the families of the 43 students, had clashed on previous occasions with Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero.
A day after the Aug. 18 release of a report from the truth commission appointed by Lopez Obrador that deemed the mass abduction and murder a “state crime” involving local, state and federal officials, the FRG said that 83 arrest warrants were issued for army personnel, police and organized crime figures, among other suspects.
Neither Gomez Trejo nor the FRG have commented publicly on the prosecutor’s resignation.
Without offering further details, Lopez Obrador said he will quickly name a successor to Gomez Trejo.
“I say to the Azotzinapa youths, to the mothers, to the fathers, to have confidence that will continue with the investigation,” the leftist president said. “I hope they believe me. We are receiving many pressures of all kinds and from many parts, but we have the firm will to do justice.”
On the night of Sept. 26, 2014, students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School, an all-male college known for its leftist activism, were attacked in Iguala, Guerrero, after they had commandeered buses to travel to Mexico City for a protest.
Six people – including three students – were killed in the assault, 25 were injured and 43 students were abducted and presumably slain later.
The administration of then-President Enrique Peña Nieto said in 2015 that the students were killed by a local drug gang after being abducted by municipal cops acting on the orders of Iguala’s corrupt mayor, and that their bodies were incinerated at a dump in the nearby town of Cocula.
Victims’ families were immediately skeptical of that account, as was the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts, a team – which included Gomez Trejo – assembled by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights who concluded that the bodies could not have been disposed of in the way authorities claimed.
Army Gen. Jose Rodriguez Perez, who was commander of the 27th Infantry Battalion based in Iguala at the time of the crime, was arrested earlier this month in connection with the abduction and murder eight years ago of 43 students from Ayotzinapa teacher’s college in the southern state of Guerrero.
EFE
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