Mexico's independent National Human Rights Commission says it has obtained witness testimony implicating federal law enforcement officers in the September 2014 disappearance of 43 education students in the southern state of Guerrero.
"Today we share information that would allow us to assume the participation of (municipal police) elements from Huitzuco and elements of the Federal Police in the events," commission chair Luis Raul Gonzalez Perez told a press conference in the capital.
On the night of September 26, 2014, police in the city of Iguala attacked students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School, a nearby teachers training institution, after the students had commandeered buses that they planned to use to travel to Mexico City for a protest.
Six people - including three students - were killed and 43 other students were abducted that night.
The official version of events is that corrupt Iguala cops handed over the young people to the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel, which then murdered the students and cremated the remains at the dump in nearby Cocula in an enormous fire that burned for hours.
The rights commission, however, said it has learned that police from Huitzuco, Guerrero, assisted their Iguala counterparts in transporting the captured students.
Finding they didn't have enough vehicles to carry the students, the Iguala officers summoned reinforcements from Huitzuco, according to the commission's account.
"Moments later, three patrol vehicles arrived - presumably from Huitzuco - and they began to load the normal school students," the commission's special investigator for the Ayotzinapa case, Jose Larrieta, said during the press conference.
Two Federal Police patrol vehicles then appeared at the scene, Larrieta said, citing the testimony of two Iguala cops.
When one of the federal officers asked where the students were being taken, an Iguala cop told him they would be brought to Huitzuco, where "the boss" would decide "what to do with them".
The Federal Police officer accepted that response and allowed the Iguala cops to proceed, according to the commission.
The "boss" was likely a local gangster and the federal officers' acquiescence indicates they knew the intentions of the Iguala cops, making the feds complicit in the crime, Larrieta said.
Relatives of the missing students refuse to accept the official version of events and have staged numerous protests to demand action in the case.
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