Mexico asks Canada to arrest, extradite ex-investigator

Pulse News Agency International by AFP

July 10, 2020 9:36 PM

Mexico is to seek the arrest and extradition from Canada of the former chief investigator in the murky disappearance of 43 students in 2014, Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said Friday.

Tomas Zeron (shown September 2015 in a handout picture released by Mexico's General Attorney's office), who was head of the Criminal Investigation Agency, is in Canada and work is underway to extradite him

Tomas Zeron, who was head of the Criminal Investigation Agency, is in Canada and work is underway to extradite him, the minister said.

"There is going to be no impunity, part of our function at the ministry of foreign affairs is to guarantee that, when there are cases of this nature, extradition occurs," Ebrard said.

Zeron fled Mexico earlier this year and is wanted on an Interpol notice over allegations that torture was used to extract supposed confessions from suspects.

Mexican media reported that the former official had been in Canada since last October, according to his immigration record.

Zeron is one of the architects of the so-called "historical truth", the official version of the case presented in January 2015 by the government of then-president Enrique Pena Nieto, which was rejected by the victims' families.

"The historical truth is over and I want to emphasize, the case is still open," Omar Gomez, the prosecutor assigned to the case by the Lopez Obrador government, said Tuesday.

The disappearance of the teaching students in 2014 sent shockwaves around the country.

The students had commandeered five buses to travel to a protest on the night of September 26, 2014, but were stopped by municipal police in the city of Iguala, Guerrero.

Prosecutors initially said the officers delivered the 43 teacher trainees to drug cartel hitmen, who killed them, incinerated their bodies and dumped the remains in a river.

However, independent experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights have rejected the government's conclusion, and the unsolved case remains a stain on Mexico's reputation.

Meanwhile, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was meeting Friday with close relatives of the students.

Pulse News Agency International by AFP