New Witness Account Undermines Mexican Government Narrative of Missing Students Anabel Hernandez & Steve Fisher - The Huffington Post
go to original June 14, 2015

As dusk fell on Sept. 26, a group of more than 100 Ayotzinapa students traveled toward the city of Iguala to steal buses, a common tradition among the state’s leftwing college pupils, who often use them to go to political protests. That night, after taking the buses, the students were attacked three times. The first one was at 9:40 p.m., when the municipal police fired shots into the air. Then around 10 p.m., the students were shot at by both the municipal police and the federal police. In the third attack, around midnight, the students were once again shot at, this time by a group they could not identify.

By the end of the night, three students and three bystanders had been killed, more than 15 students had been wounded - and 43 had been abducted.

Eight months have passed since then, but more questions than answers remain about what happened that night. Federal prosecutors, whose case rests partly on confessions that appear to have been given during torture, allege that Iguala Mayor José Luis Abarca ordered the attacks on the students to prevent them from disrupting a political event for his wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda. (In fact, the political event that night ended two hours prior to the first attack.) They say local police took the 43 missing students from Juan Alvarez street in Iguala, where the violence took place, and brought them to the Iguala police station at 11:30 p.m. From there, the federal attorney general’s office says two police patrol trucks from the nearby municipality of Cocula carried the students away, to be handed off to the drug gang Guerreros Unidos, who prosecutors say killed the students and incinerated their bodies in a dumpster in Cocula.

But a magistrate judge who spent the entire night of Sept. 26 in the Iguala police station offers a completely different account. In an exclusive interview as part of an investigation supported by the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley, former Magistrate Judge Ulises Bernabé García describes what he says really happened in the Iguala police station that night. It’s the first time a member of the security forces present at the police station that night has spoken publicly about what happened there - calling into question the government’s official investigation.

What We Know About the Events of Sept. 26: A Timeline



Read the whole story at The Huffington Post

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