Mexico City - (AFP) - The Mexican judiciary ordered, on Friday, the arrest of the country's former public prosecutor and 64 police and military personnel in the case of the disappearance of 43 students in a school in Ayotzinapa, in the south of the country in 2014, a day after the publication of a report by an official committee that described the incident as a "state crime."

The Public Prosecution said in a statement that the former Public Prosecutor, Jesus Murillo Karam, was arrested on Friday evening at his home in Mexico City on charges of "causing enforced disappearance, torture and violations against the administration of justice," explaining that he did not show any resistance.

Then she announced that the judiciary had issued an order on Friday to arrest 64 army and police officials for their supposed involvement in the disappearance of the students, a case that caused great shock in Mexico and abroad. She explained that they are wanted on charges of "organized crime, enforced disappearance, torture, murders and misdemeanors against the administration of justice."
The identities and ranks of the wanted men were not revealed.

Maurio Karam, who was a public prosecutor under President Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018) and led a controversial preliminary investigation into these disappearances. He is a former member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party that ruled Mexico for 71 years without interruption until the year 2000.

He is the most important person arrested so far in the framework of these investigations, which were resumed from scratch after leftist President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador came to power in 2019.

The Public Prosecution issued arrest warrants for 14 members of the drug smuggling gang "Gueiros Unidos".

The case concerns a group of students from the Teachers' Training School in Ayotzinapa, in the state of Guehiro (south), who went on the night of September 26 to 27 to the nearby city of Iguala in order to "request" buses to go to Mexico to participate in a demonstration.

The investigation revealed that the police arrested 43 of them as part of a case linked to the drug trafficking gang "Guehiro Oneidos", then shot them and burned their bodies in a dump for reasons that are still unclear. Only the remains of three of them have been identified.

The official report of the "Truth Commission in Ayotzinapa" set up by President Lopez Obrador stated that Mexican soldiers bear part of the responsibility in this crime.

"Their actions, omission or participation allowed the students to disappear and be killed, as well as the killing of six other people," Alejandro Encinas, Undersecretary of the Ministry of the Interior, said during the presentation of the report.

Encinas explained that "no work was carried out with a mandate from an institution, but there were clear responsibilities for elements" of the armed forces, without specifying whether these "elements" were still working in the army.

Encinas has several times described the Ayotzinapa case as a "state crime".

Another commission, the "Multidisciplinary Group of Independent Experts" set up under an agreement between the government of former President Peña Nieto and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, asserts that soldiers falsified evidence found at the rubbish dump where the bodies were cremated.

The first official report by Maurio Karam, whose findings were rejected by independent experts and the families of the victims, did not hold the army responsible. That report accused a drug cartel of killing the students, believing them to be members of a rival gang.

Lopez Obrador stressed Friday that "making this terrible and inhumane situation public and punishing those responsible at the same time makes it possible to prevent such unfortunate events from happening again" and "strengthens institutions."

The Mexican president said he would continue to urge Israel to extradite the former head of the criminal investigation agency of the Attorney General's office, Tomas Zeron.

Waziron is accused of being involved in the Ayotzinapa case but maintains his innocence. This former senior official fled to Israel, where he sought asylum.