Mexico: Investigation shows that all 43 students are dead

Relatives and protestors carry banners with pictures of some of the 43 missing students from a rural teachers college, as they march along a main boulevard in Mexico City, Monday, Jan. 26, 2015. Protest marches were planned in cities around Mexico to mark the fourth month since the disappearance of the students in southern Guerrero state. The federal prosecutor has said the students were detained by local police and handed over to a drug gang, who killed them and burned their bodies. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo) Relatives and protestors carry banners with pictures of some of the 43 missing students from a rural teachers college, as they march along a main boulevard in Mexico City, Monday, Jan. 26, 2015. Protest marches were planned in cities around Mexico to mark the fourth month since the disappearance of the students in southern Guerrero state. The federal prosecutor has said the students were detained by local police and handed over to a drug gang, who killed them and burned their bodies. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)

By Associated Press January 27, 2015 4 min read

MEXICO CITY (AP) – Investigators are now certain that 43 college students missing since September were killed and incinerated after they were seized by police in southern Guerrero state, the Mexican attorney general said Tuesday.

It was the first time Jesus Murillo Karam said definitely that all were dead, even though Mexican authorities have DNA identification for only one student and a declaration from a laboratory in Innsbruck, Austria, that it appears impossible to identify the others.

The attorney general cited confessions and forensic evidence from an area near a garbage dump where the Sept. 26 crime occurred.

“The evidence allows us to determine that the students were kidnapped, killed, burned and thrown into the river,” Murillo Karam said in a press conference that included a video reconstruction of the mass slaying and of the investigation into the case.

He added that “there is not a single shred of evidence that the army intervened … not a single shred of evidence of the participation of the army,” as relatives of the victims have claimed.