Ayotzinapa Missing 43: Remains of 2nd Mexican Student Identified, Mexican

“This isn’t the first time they tell me he’s dead”, said Margarito Guerrero, father of the second young man identified from remains found after the disappearance of 43 students in Mexico.

An Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has recently said that the physical evidence at the dump did not support the official story that the students were cremated at the site. The identified student was Alexander Mora Venancio.

Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz, 21, from the southwestern state of Guerrero, was identified as one of the 43 disappeared Ayotzinapa students, according to forensic experts of the University of Innsbruck, Austria.

Distraught relatives of the missing students have vocally questioned the account offered by the Mexican authorities and have been suspicious of any official word regarding their missing loved ones.

Prosecutors concluded past year that local police in the southern city of Iguala shot at buses that the unarmed students had seized on the night of September 26-27 for their political activities. IACHR experts said the bag was found an hour’s drive from the garbage dump, suggesting that they could have been burnt elsewhere.

Current attorney general Gomez, pictured above, told reporters that the Innsbruck scientists used three methods to cross-reference samples of mitochondrial DNA found in the 17 pieces of remains.

But the independent report said the dump fire was not strong enough to burn the victims to ashes, and it said investigators from Chile, Colombia, Guatemala and Spain based that finding on expert analysis.

The federal Attorney General’s office is expected to hold a press conference later today.

Felipe de la Cruz, a spokesman for the families, said he could not “trust the voice of a government that has always lied and is trying to rescue the “historic truth” on the basis of not very clear results”. “The investigation headed by Gomez began to move its pieces this week in an attempt to disprove the new information provided” by the report.

But earlier this month, worldwide experts reviewing the Mexican government’s probe of the abductions rejected the government’s official narrative.

According to a profile of him on the website of a human rights group working with the families, Guerrero de la Cruz talked about resources being scarce in his town.