Former Mexican Attorney General Jesús Murillo, accused of having participated in the disappearance of 43 students in 2014, will be criminally prosecuted, a judge in the Mexican capital ruled Tuesday.
The case achieved great notoriety and even President Andrés Manuel López Obrador undertook to explain it.
The Federal Judiciary Council reported that Murillo, 74, will be tried for the crimes of forced disappearance, torture and against the administration of justice.
Murillo, who was also a former deputy, senator and governor of Hidalgo between 1993 and 1998, had been arrested last Friday, which so far constitutes the arrest of the highest-ranking former official in the unfortunate event.
The detainee was in charge of the attorney general’s office during the first half of former president Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration (2012-2018), during which time he led the government’s efforts to resolve what happened, in an event that shocked the country and evidenced the degree of collusion between authorities and organized crime.
A group of independent experts, GIEI, found serious flaws in the conclusions given by the prosecutorial team at the time, which maintained that the students of the school in the town of Ayotzinapa, in the southern state of Guerrero, had been incinerated in a garbage dump on orders of a criminal gang and that the former official called a “historical truth”.
“For seven years they have been looking for an alternative, they have invented many, and they all fall,” Murillo defended himself during his indictment hearing, according to local media.
“I can accept some mistakes, mistakes could be made, problems and accept things that were done wrong, but no one has been able to throw it away (the historical truth),” he added.
President López Obrador promised to clarify the crime when he took office in 2018, after the GIEI said that the original official account of what happened was riddled with errors and abuses, including the torture of witnesses.
To date, only the remains of three of the students, who were known to have been kidnapped in the southwestern city of Iguala. Murillo’s investigation concluded that a local drug gang, working with corrupt police officers, killed the normalistas after mistaking them for members of a rival group.
*Part of the information for this report came from the Reuters agency.
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