43 Missing Mexican Students Update: Mexico Report Says Authorities Had Real-Time Info on Attack, Questions Involvement of Iguala Mayor José Luis Abarca

According to Mexico City-based news magazine Proceso, Mexican federal authorities may have had real-time information regarding the attack on 43 student teachers by local police and yet did nothing to stop their disappearance or murder.

According to the The Guardian, who report they have not yet been able to verify the magazine’s account, the Proceso report is based on documents from an initial state-level investigation, which was impeded in October when federal authorities took over the case.

The documents include the real time records of the students' movements recorded by a government information command center known as C4 posts, which is run by state governments and may collect and distribute information to all local and federal law enforcement agencies within a particular region.

The documents detail that the students left their college in Ayotzinapa in the town of Tixtl and traveled to Iguala by bus with the intention of getting more buses from the city to use in a subsequent protest.

The C4 reportedly informed the head of the federal police unit who was stationed in Iguala when the students arrived at the city’s bus station at 9:22 p.m. About 20 minutes later, the C4 reported that gunfire had broken out.

“When we see that the federal government and the state government were following the students since they left the college in Ayotzinapa, it becomes very difficult to think that everything else that happened was an accident," Anabel Hernández, one of the authors of the article, said.

The article alleges that federal forces somehow participated in the eventual massacre.

The report also calls into questions the official version of the story, which is that Iguala Mayor José Luis Abarca ordered the attacks on the students for fear that the they would disrupt an event intended to promote his wife María de los Angeles Pineda’s political ambitions. The political event was over at 8 p.m., which was more than an hour before the students even reached Iguala.

Abarca and his wife have been arrested in connection with the massacre.