Mexico's missing student probe under fire

The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, which includes experts from 30 countries, issued a 16-page statement on Saturday in which it strongly criticized the conclusions reached by the Mexican Attorney General's office as to what happened to the students, who disappeared in September.

The findings of the team, hired as an independent party on behalf of the students' parents, come after Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam last month told a press conference that he had the "legal certainty" that the students were murdered in the southern state of Guerrero.

Murillo Karam said investigators had concluded that the 43 young men were arrested by corrupt municipal police in the city of Iguala on September 26 and handed over to a drug gang, who killed the them, burnt their remains at a garbage dump in the town of Cocula, and disposed of them in a river.

The students all came from a leftist teachers' training college in the city.

The press conference has been seen by many as an effort by the government to assuage public outrage at the students' disappearance by closing the case. Murillo Karam later said he was not trying to end the investigation.

Errors and anomalies

In its statement, the Argentine-led team said it did "not exclude the possibility that some of the students met the demise" described by Murilo Karam.

"However, in our opinion, there is no scientific evidence to that effect at the Cocula landfill," the statement said.

Among other things, the team said it had found human remains at the dump that did not belong to the students, including a tooth belonging to a set of dentures - even though none of the students wore false teeth.

It also noted that it had found anomalies in 20 genetic profiles collected from family members of the 43 students, which made them unsuitable for use in DNA matches.

So far, only one of the students, Alexander Mora, could be identified from charred bones found in the river.

According the team's statement, satellite evidence showed that there had many fires at the landfill since 2010, meaning that any evidence at the site could stem from unrelated events. It also criticized that the dump was left unguarded for three weeks after the discovery of the remains, making it possible for evidence to be planted or manipulated.

The report called for further investigation of the landfill, saying that the probe into the students' disappearance could not be closed while there was still important evidence that needed processing.

The non-profit Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team was established in 1984 to probe cases of a least 9,000 people missing under Argentina's military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. It now investigates human right violations around the world.

tj/sms (AP, AFP)