Mexico City, October 23 (RHC-EFE) -- The mayor of the southern Mexican city of Iguala and his wife were behind the Sept. 26 attacks on trainee teachers that left six people dead and 43 students missing, the federal Attorney General's Office said Wednesday.
Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam said at a press conference that the mayor, José Luis Abarca, ordered police to attack the students to prevent them from disrupting an event that night in which his wife, head of the local family services office, was to give a speech.
His remarks to the press came on a day in which thousands of students, teachers and civil society members marched Wednesday in numerous cities across Mexico to demand that authorities get to the bottom of the case of the missing students.
After last Friday's arrest of the leader of the Guerreros Unidos cartel, Sidronio Casarrubias, authorities learned that the Iguala mayor's office was completely infiltrated by organized crime and received between 2-3 million pesos (between US$148,000 and US $222,000) a month from that drug mob.
Local police were also controlled by organized crime, with a least 600,000 pesos (some US$44,500) being spent monthly to pay corrupt police and the cartel in charge of selecting new entrants to the force. Murillo said that a total of 30 bodies have been found in nine clandestine graves, two more than initially indicated.
Initial DNA tests have revealed that the remains do not correspond to the missing youths, but the results of further tests based on samples taken by an Argentinian team are still pending.