Mexico City, October 9 (teleSUR-RHC)-- Independent experts will probe a number of highly controversial government claims about the forced disappearance of the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teachers training college, Mexican Attorney General Arely Gomez told the Mexican Senate Thursday.

The group will be tasked with investigating the possibility that the students' bodies were burned in a dump by an organized crime group. Experts have asserted that a fire big enough to incinerate the students’ bodies would have required an extraordinary amount of fuel, would have burned for days, and would have been visible from afar, none of which has ever been corroborated.

According to Proceso magazine, Gomez reiterated that the investigation into the 43 students’s disappearance was “not a closed case” and repeated her earlier comments where she said that “other lines of investigation had been opened in which we have identified more material perpetrators.”
       
Gomez announced that a group of seven experts from five different countries will collaborate in the independent investigation, including a member of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts, known as the GIEI.

In its September report the GIEI contradicted many of the government's assertions and specifically revealed that a fifth bus had been commandeered by the students. The report speculated that this fifth bus may have been carrying drugs or money belonging to an organized crime group and that this may have been the motive for the disproportionately violent response by state security officials on the night of the students' disappearance.

The attorney general added that the GIEI would inspect this infamous fifth bus.  Mexican newspaper La Jornada reported that Gomez told senators that state officials are in possession of this bus, which contradicts previous reports regarding the fifth bus. When the GIEI first asked to inspect this bus they were shown another bus that was made to look like it had been attacked. When challenged by the GIEI, federal officials said they could not produce the bus.

Gomez also said that her office had created the Special Prosecutor for the Search of Missing Persons.

Mexican lawmakers have drafted a bill that could impose 100 years in prison for the crime of forced disappearance and called for the creation of a specialized unit to investigate forced disappearances.

Until recently, the government had maintained that the version of events put forward by the attorney general's office was the “historical truth,” but criticism borne out of the GIEI report appears to have led the Mexican government to soften its position.