Remains of one of 43 students who went missing in Mexico more than five years ago identified

Authorities in Mexico have identified the remains of one of 43 students who disappeared in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, more than five years ago without no trace.



The identification of one of the bodies, known as Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre on Tuesday July 7, was done with the help of DNA testing and is a major breakthrough in the case which has left Mexicans dumbfounded, Mexican authorities have announced.



On September 26, 2014, 43 students from a teacher's college in Guerrero state suddenly disappeared and investigations by the former Mexican administration of Enrique Peña Nieto concluded they were captured by police and handed over to the criminal group Guerreros Unidos.







According to the investigation, their bodies were burned in a landfill and then thrown into a river in the municipality of Cocula -- a theory that was termed, "the historical truth."



But an investigation carried out by forensic experts in Argentina contradicted that hypothesis, causing the entire disappearance of the students to be shrouded in mystery for years.



When Andrés Manuel López Obrador took over as president of Mexico, he vowed to find out the truth, and then created a commission which reopened the investigation and started from scratch.



According to Mexico's Attorney General's Office, the new discovery of the body comes from six pieces of remains which were sent to the laboratory at the University of Innsbruck in Vienna, Austria, where they were analyzed for months.



Contradicting the previous administration's investigation, the body evidence, they said, was not found in the landfill or the river, instead they were found about 800 meters from "where the historical truth is created," the attorney general's office said.

"Without a doubt this marks the beginning of the new route in the investigation that not only collapsed the so-called historical truth, but also generates the conditions for the indications, the evidence, the investigations carried out to clarify the events that unfortunately happened in Ayotzinapa," Mexico's undersecretary of Human Rights Alejandro Encinas said.

“We have broken the pact of impunity and silence that surrounded” the case, Mr. Omar Gómez Trejo, the special prosecutor assigned to the case said at a news conference.

He added, “today we tell the families and society that the right to the truth will prevail.”