14 of 57 missing Mexican students found alive

IGUALA DE LA INDEPENDENCIA, Mexico – Fourteen of 57 students who vanished after deadly shootings in southern Mexico have turned up alive but relatives feared for those still missing as authorities search for them.

A dozen troops manned a checkpoint Tuesday, September 30, between Guerrero’s state capital, Chilpancingo, and the town of Iguala, stopping cars and checking IDs against a list of the missing students from a teacher training college.

The students disappeared following a bout of violence in Iguala late Friday and Saturday (September 26 and 27) that left 6 people dead and 25 wounded in different parts of the municipality.

In one of the incidents, municipal police opened fire on three buses seized by the radical students, who are known to hijack buses and had taken them to go home after a fundraising drive in Iguala.

Three students were killed. A survivor told Agence France-Presse on Tuesday that he saw officers take away 30 to 40 students in several police cruisers and they have yet to be found.

Prosecutors said they were able to connect 22 officers who were detained to the six killings after ballistics tests linked their weapons to the shootings.

The officers are being investigated over the disappearances, said state prosecutor Inaky Blanco. Authorities are investigating whether organized crime was involved.

Guerrero is one of Mexico’s poorest state, beset by violence by a slew of drug gangs and social unrest.

“Unfortunately most of Iguala’s municipal police officers have links with organized crime,” said Governor Angel Aguirre following reports that unidentified masked gunmen were involved in some of the shootings.

He said street surveillance cameras captured officers taking away an unspecified number of students.

Francisco Ochoa, 18, told Agence France-Presse he was among 14 students in a fourth bus that was stopped by the police.

The students came out and fled after the officers began to shoot in the air, he said. After hiding on the hills and other parts of town, the 14 students found other comrades in a marketplace.

“More patrol cars arrived from the right and the left, 12 to 13 of them,” he said.

“I saw with my own eyes how they took away my comrades. I saw how they put 30-40 of them in patrol cars,” he said at a wake for a fallen comrade attended by hundreds of people at the Raul Isidro teacher training school in Tixtla.

Problems with military

The police shooting came as the military faces its own problem after federal prosecutors sought charges Tuesday against three soldiers accused of executing 22 gang suspects south of Mexico City in June.

Ramon Navarette, president of Guerrero’s Human Rights Commission, raised hopes that the 43 missing may still be alive, saying they may be hiding like the 14 students who reappeared.

“This tactic of dispersing to avoid harm or arrest is very frequent,” he said.

Witnesses reported a night of terror in Iguala.

Fatima Bahene Pena, a 29-year-old special education teacher, lay in the town’s general hospital with bullet wounds in her right foot and left shoulder.

She said she was invited to help the students raise funds when she arrived at a chaotic scene of students bleeding in the street after their buses were fired at during a police chase.

The second attack came as she was cleaning a man’s chest wound inside a car.

“The muchacho raised his head and he saw that it was the police,” she said as state police officers armed with assault rifles guarded the hospital.

A second shooting took place on the outskirts of town.

Aureliano Garca Ceron, a 35-year-old taxi driver, was transporting two customers in the early hours of Saturday when shots suddenly rang out.

“All I could see were the sparks of the guns,” he said as he recovered from a broken leg shattered by a bullet.

Amnesty International urged the authorities to take all necessary measures to find the missing. – Rappler.com