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Mexican mayor arrested over students’ abduction Mexican mayor arrested over students’ abduction
(35 minutes later)
Mexican police have captured a former mayor and his wife who are suspected of ordering the disappearance of 43 students feared massacred in September. Police have detained the former mayor of the southern Mexican city of Iguala, who officials say ordered the attacks on students at a teachers’ college in September that left six dead and 43 missing.
The students were abducted by police in league with a local drug gang in the south-western city of Iguala on the night of 26 September, sparking a huge manhunt and undermining President Enrique Peña Nieto’s claims that Mexico has become safer under his watch. The government is still searching for the students. José Luis Abarca and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, were arrested in Mexico City without resisting, according to two security officials. They provided no other details.
José Ramon Salinas, a federal police spokesman, tweeted that José Luis Abarca, who was mayor of Iguala at the time of the abductions, and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, had been captured in Mexico City. A government official said more information would be released about the capture later. The couple was in the custody of the attorney general’s office, where they were giving statements. More than a month after the attacks, Mexican authorities still have not determined the whereabouts of the 43 students, undermining President Enrique Peña Nieto’s claims that Mexico has become safer under his watch.
Their detention could shed light on disappearances, which have remained a mystery.
The rural teachers college students disappeared after an attack by police in Iguala, which is in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. Authorities say it was ordered by Abarca, who thought the students were aiming to interrupt a speech by Pineda, and was carried out by police working with the Guerreros Unidos cartel. Authorities say Pineda was an operative in the cartel.
The search for the students has taken authorities to the hills above Iguala, where 30 bodies have been found in mass graves but not identified so far as any of the students. Last week, the search turned to a gully near a rubbish dump in the neighbouring city of Cocula, but still no remains have been identified.