MEXICO CITY (AP) – The government’s human rights agency is accusing federal police of executing at least 22 people during a confrontation with suspected cartel criminals last year and then rearranging the scene by moving bodies and planting guns to support the official version of the bloodshed.
Twenty other people were killed during the incident at a ranch in the western Mexico state of Michoacan, while one police officer died, an imbalance that had raised questions about what happened on May 22, 2015.
The National Human Rights Commission said Thursday that in addition to 22 unjustified slayings, there were also two cases of torture and four more deaths caused by excessive force by federal police. It said it could not establish satisfactorily the circumstances of 15 others who were shot to death.
“The investigation confirmed facts that show grave human rights violations attributable to public servants of the federal police,” commission President Luis Raul Gonzalez Perez said.
The government has said the dead were suspected members of the Jalisco New Generation cartel who were hiding out on the ranch in Tanhuato and accused them of starting the confrontation by firing at police first.