8-Mexico Officially Declares Missing Students Dead

Mexico Officially Declares Missing Students Dead

MEXICO CITY — Four months after the abduction of 43 rural college students shook the nation and set off a political crisis, Mexico’s attorney general on Tuesday officially declared the students dead, saying confessions and forensic evidence supported the theory that their bodies were incinerated near a garbage dump.

The attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, delivered a detailed account of the case that did not divert much from what was previously known. Yet he went beyond hints that the students had been killed to declare that after an “exhaustive, serious” investigation, “the evidence allows us to determine that the students were kidnapped, killed, burned and thrown into the river.”

Mr. Murillo Karam, in what appeared to be an effort to convince an increasingly skeptical public that investigators had solved the crime, showed photographs of charred remains, snippets of videotaped confessions and the crime scene. He also disclosed that nearly 100 people had been arrested, 39 confessions obtained and thousands of fragments of human remains recovered.

Over somber music, he played a short video account of the night of the crime, based on what investigators had learned.

The case has led to a series of mass protest marches, most recently on Monday, and raised doubts about the rule of law in Mexico. It has helped send President Enrique Peña Nieto’s approval ratings plummeting to levels not seen by a Mexican president in two decades.

The president has promised to revamp local policing and adopt measures to address widespread impunity, but analysts have said he also does not wish a security crisis to define a term that he had hoped would be devoted to improving a slowing economy and buffing Mexico’s image.

In a speech shortly before Mr. Murillo Karam spoke, Mr. Peña Nieto suggested it was time for the nation to move on, even as the public harbors doubts.

“In this sorrowful, tragic and painful moment in the history of Mexico, we can’t be trapped. We can’t be stuck there,” he said. “We have to give it attention. There has to be justice. There has to be punishment for those who were responsible for these regrettable acts, but we have to take the course of continuing to assure that Mexico has a better future.”

The students, from Escuela Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos, a rural teachers college in Ayotzinapa, about an hour’s drive from Acapulco, had gone to another city, Iguala, on Sept. 26 to collect money and steal buses to use in a protest march in Mexico City. But the mayor, José Luis Abarca, who has since been arrested, ordered the police to detain the students, and they were turned over to a drug gang known as Guerreros Unidos, Mr. Murillo Karam said.

Structure of the Lead：

   WHO-  the abduction of 43 rural college students

   WHEN JAN 2015

   WHAT-Mexico Officially Declares Missing Students Dead

   WHY-not given

   WHERE- Mexico

   HOW-not given

KeyWords:

 evidence證明

exhaustive徹底的

plummet暴跌

sorrowful傷心的

sophisticated精密的