Parents of missing Mexican students stage protest

Parents of the 43 students who disappeared in 2014 in the state of Guerrero staged protests here, the media reported.

The families were joined by members of grassroots groups for a six-hour-long sit-in on Thursday outside the Attorney General's Office before setting off on a march from the Angel de la Independencia monument to the Zocalo, the capital city's main square, Efe news reported.

During the sit-in, attorney Vidulfo Rosales and a delegation of parents entered the building to demand a meeting with officials.

They emerged from the offices announcing a February 9 meeting with Attorney General Raul Cervantes and the likelihood of talks on February 10 with officials of the Government Secretariat.

"We will be here to continue demanding truth and justice," Rosales said, emphasising that 28 months after the mass kidnapping, "we are at the beginning: we don't have clues about the location of our student comrades, all we have are irregular, flawed investigations."

On the night of September 26, 2014, students from Ayotzinapa Normal School, a rural all-male teacher training college known for its leftist activism, were attacked in Iguala, Guerrero, after they commandeered buses to travel to Mexico City for a protest.

Six people - including three students - were killed, 25 were injured and 43 students were abducted.

The Mexican government says the students were killed by a local drug gang after being abducted by municipal cops acting on the orders of Iguala's corrupt mayor, and that their bodies were incinerated at a waste dump in the nearby town of Cocula.

Mexican and international experts concluded that the bodies could not have been disposed off in the way described by the government, while leaked reports from the Attorney General's Office established the involvement of federal police and military personnel in the Iguala violence.

--IANS

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