Ayotzinapa Missing 43: Remains of 2nd Mexican Student Identified, Mexican Government Says
Last September the world was shocked when 43 students from a rural teacher’s college in Mexico disappeared and were believed to have been incinerated at a dump by a drug gang working with local police.
In December, the remains of one of the missing were identified. Now the identity of a second student has been released.
The New York Times reports on Wednesday Attorney General Arely Gómez revealed tests done at the Medical University of Innsbruck in Austria had determined that a recovered bone fragment belonged to a student named Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz. The student was 20 at the time of his disappearance.
Gómez said that the victim’s remain were found in a rubbish dump outside the city.
Identifying the dead in the case of the 43 students that went missing the state of Guerrero nearly a year ago has been painstakingly slow. Last December the remains of 19-year-old Alexander Mora Venancio were identified.
The official government story behind the deaths is that the students were taken away in buses by corrupt local police officers in the city of Iguala and then handed over to a drug gang who then executed them and cremated the bodies at a nearby dump.
Distraught relatives of the missing students have vocally questioned the account offered by the Mexican authorities and have been suspicious of any official word regarding their missing loved ones.
An Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has recently said that the physical evidence at the dump did not support the official story that the students were cremated at the site.
"This isn't the first time they tell me he's dead," said Margarito Guerrero, Jhosivani Guerrero’s father, who spoke to VICE shortly after his son had been identified by the Attorney General.
"I know he is not."
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