Mexico City, October 7 (teleSUR-RHC)-- Mexico’s Defense Secretary said late Monday that he will not allow national soldiers to be questioned by international investigators over the apparent abduction and killing of 43 students in Ayotzinapa last year.

“I can’t allow them to interrogate my soldiers, who at this point haven’t committed a single crime,” said Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos in an interview with the Televisa network. He said soldiers only answer to Mexican authorities.

His comments came after two separate reports, published last month, contradicted government claims that soldiers were not in the area when, a little over a year ago, dozens of students at Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College in the state of Guerrero went missing. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, or IACHR, an autonomous arm of the Organization of American States, and the Mexican Proceso magazine conducted separate investigations that both found soldiers were in fact present at the time of the incident.
    
IACHR investigators have criticized the government’s investigation of the disappearance and have sought to interview the soldiers who they say were present. Meanwhile, a report from Proceso magazine revealed that bullet casings from weapons carried by the Mexican army were found at the crime scene.

The Mexican government has already conceded a state role in the incident, accusing Jose Luis Abarca, mayor of the town of Iguala, of ordering local police to kidnap the students and hand them over to a local gang to be killed. Tomás Zerón de Lucio, head of Mexico's Criminal Investigations Agency, has claimed the students were mistakenly identified as members of a rival criminal organization. “That was the reason why they were deprived of their freedom, initially, and then of their lives," he said in January.
   
The IAHCR report accuses the army of having witnessed the events as they unfolded and failing to intervene. The report in Proceso suggests soldiers actually fired on the students, perhaps mistaking them for criminals.