Ex-mayor, wife held over missing Mexican students
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MEXICAN police have captured a fugitive former mayor and his wife who the government says were the probable masterminds behind the abduction of 43 students feared massacred in September, officials said yesterday.
Police working with a local drug gang in the southwestern city of Iguala abducted the students after clashes there on the night of September 26, sparking a huge manhunt and embarrassment for President Enrique Pena Nieto.
Jose Luis Abarca, who at the time was mayor of Iguala, and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, were captured in Mexico City, Jose Ramon Salinas, a spokesman for the federal police, said on his Twitter account.
A government official said the pair were held early yesterday and were being questioned by prosecutors.
The couple were arrested by federal security forces in a house in the eastern district of Iztapalapa, Mexican media reported, where they had been hiding out for several weeks.
The government is still searching for the students, whose disappearance undermined Pena Nieto’s claims that Mexico has become safer on his watch.
The Mexican government said last month that Abarca and his wife had ordered police to stop a group of about 80 students from disrupting a political event on the night of September 26.
Six people, including three students, died in the ensuing clashes in the state of Guerrero. Shortly afterward, the mayor and his wife Pineda went underground. The government says Pineda is from a family of drug traffickers.
Investigators said the police handed over the students to a local drug gang, Guerreros Unidos, who many officials suspect of killing the youths.
Despite dozens of arrests and the discovery of the remains of at least 38 bodies buried near Iguala, it still remains unclear what happened to the students, who belonged to a radical leftist college in Guerrero.
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