Mexican President Expresses Concern over Attacks on Students

MEXICO CITY – Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto said on Monday he was concerned about the attacks on students last month in Iguala, a city in the southern state of Guerrero.

The Sept. 26 attacks were “outrageous, painful and unacceptable,” the president said in a brief statement to the media.

The security Cabinet has been ordered to “clear up” who was behind the wave of violence that left six people dead and 43 education students missing in Iguala, Peña Nieto said.

“I regret, in particular, the violence that occurred and especially that it was young students who were affected and subjected to violence in the city of Iguala,” Peña Nieto said, adding that he was “deeply outraged” and “dismayed over the reports that came out over the weekend.”

The Guerrero Attorney General’s Office confirmed Sunday that 28 bodies were found in clandestine graves in Iguala.

The bodies may be those of some of the 43 teacher trainees who disappeared 10 days ago following a series of attacks on students by police and criminals, the AG’s office said.

Officials are awaiting the results of DNA tests to identify the 28 bodies, some of which were burned and dismembered.

The three suspects arrested in connection with the incidents told investigators that they killed 17 students on a hill in Pueblo Viejo, where the clandestine graves were found.

The missing students’ relatives and society “want ... the incidents cleared up and want justice done,” Peña Nieto said, adding that his administration would work with Guerrero state officials to “learn the truth and ensure that the law was applied to those responsible.”

Relatives of the 43 missing students called Saturday for a nationwide march to protest the slow pace of the investigation and demand that authorities locate their loved ones.

In a gathering with the media at the teacher training college in the rural community of Ayotzinapa, where the young people were studying, the families said they would march on Wednesday to demand that investigators determine what happened on the night of Sept. 26.

The students went missing after a night of violence in Iguala – a city in the crime-plagued state of Guerrero – in which six people were killed, including three students of the training college for future primary-school instructors, and 25 others were injured.

The murky series of events included an attack on a bus carrying members of a Third-Division soccer team.

Twenty-two municipal police officers suspected of firing at the students for reasons yet unknown have been arrested, although the involvement of organized crime elements has not been ruled out.

Some witnesses said the 43 missing students were shoved into police vans by the same officers who had attacked them. The students came under fire from the police while riding in private buses they had illegally taken to return to their homes after a fundraising drive.