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GANG SUSPECTS HAVE confessed to killing 43 missing Mexican students, burning their bodies for 14 hours and tossing their charcoal-like remains in a river, authorities said, in a case causing national revulsion.
Facing angry protests in the biggest crisis of his administration, President Enrique Pena Nieto vowed to hunt down all those responsible for the “horrible crime.”
Authorities say the aspiring teachers vanished after gang-linked police attacked their buses in the southern city of Iguala on 26 September, allegedly under orders of the mayor and his wife in a night of terror that left six other people dead.
The police then delivered the 43 to members of the Guerreros Unidos drug gang who told investigators they took them in two trucks to a landfill and killed them.
If the confessions are proven true, the mass murder would rank among the worst massacres in a drug war that has killed more than 80,000 people and left 22,000 others missing since 2006.
The Iguala case has drawn international condemnation, highlighted Mexico’s struggle with corruption and undermined Pena Nieto’s assurances that national violence was down.
“To the parents of the missing young men and society as a whole, I assure you that we won’t stop until justice is served,” said Pena Nieto, who has shortened a trip to China and Australia starting tomorrow due to the case.
Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam stopped short yesterday of declaring the 43 dead and said an Austrian university would help identify the remains.
He said authorities will continue to consider the students as missing until DNA tests confirm the identities.
But the chief prosecutor added that there was “a lot of evidence… that could indicate it was them.”
14-hour inferno
Three Guerreros Unidos members confessed to killing the male students after police handed them over between Iguala and the neighbouring town of Cocula, Murillo Karam said, showing videos of the taped confessions.
The bodies were set on fire with gasoline, tires, firewood and plastic, in a 14-hour-long inferno downhill from a Cocula garbage dump, he said.
“The fire lasted from midnight to 2pm the next day. The criminals could not handle the bodies until 5pm due to the heat,” he said.
The suspects then crushed the remains, stuffed them in bags and threw some in a river. Suspects burned their own clothes to hide any evidence.
Murillo Karam showed videos of investigators combing through small pieces of charcoal-like remains that were found in black plastic bags. Some parts were found near the landfill.
Murillo Karam delivered the news to the relatives of the missing in an airport hangar in Chilpancingo, capital of the violence-plagued southern state of Guerrero.
But the parents, who distrust the government, said they would not accept that their children are dead until they get a final ruling from independent Argentine forensic experts who are taking part in the investigation.
“As long as there is no proof, our sons are alive,” Felipe de la Cruz, a spokesman for the families, said at a news conference from the missing young men’s teacher-training college near Chilpancingo.
“We will keep searching for them,” he said.
Last month, two hitmen had already confessed to killing 17 of the students and dumping them in a mass grave near Iguala. But authorities said tests showed none of them were among 28 bodies found in the pit.
‘Warning signs’ in corruption, violence
Authorities have now detained 74 people, including several Guerreros Unidos members, 36 Iguala and Cocula police officers and Iguala’s ousted mayor Jose Luis Abarca and his wife Maria de los Angeles Pineda.
The case has highlighted Mexico’s struggle to prevent collusion between officials and drug gangs.
Authorities say Abarca ordered the officers to confront the students over fears they would derail a speech by his wife, who headed the local child protection agency.
The missing young men said they went to Iguala to raise funds, though they hijacked four buses to move around, a common practice among students from the radical teachers college.
“The corruption and violence were warning signs for all to see for years and those who negligently ignored them are accomplices in this tragedy,” said Amnesty International’s Americas director Erika Guevara Rosas.
- © AFP 2014.
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I’m actually sick to death listing and looking at these slimeballs.They make the the mafia look like the gummi bears.
Look at them, bouncing here and there and everywhere
Bunch of f**kng muppets..
Muppets aren’t chewing on Irelands carcass while shrieking that it’s legal.
Muppets are good.
All supervised by Mario Draghi and the Troika folks -
The E.U. is an illegal organisation in Irleand now – they can be summarily arrested the second they touch ground in Eirie – for questioning like !
That’s a ridiculous comment. The reason the Troika where here in the first place was that these idiots (ie bankers, politicians and senior civil servants) ran the country into the ground and we where bankrupt.
We went to them cap in hand looking for money and if we had more sense we should have let them run the country as they would have weeded out the corruption and put manners on the senior civil servants and trade unions who are still destroying the place !
By giving billionaires massive discounts that’s what the Troika supervised – explain to me how the bonuses the bankers in Nama got for these deals helped weaken them ?
And you call my comment stupid ….
I hope you are involved in a simple harmless job – like washing cars for minimum wage or something …
Brian you were going well there until you started the blame game. It never ceases to amaze me that people commenting on the Irish economic crash neglect to mention the voters of Ireland. Those who persistently voted for parties who believed in “light touch regulation” and ever lower taxes. But shure it couldn’t ever be our own fault could it. So Irish to point the finger at everyone else but ourselves. We have learned nothing. And we delude ourselves that a new political party and more independents will save us. I despair. Moran is right by the way. A bank owned by taxpayers should have civil service or other persons on the Board to represent the interests of the owners ie the taxpayers. That is not a conflict of interest. The alternative for such a bank is liquidation.
the so called row between dept. of finance and ibrc is a sham, the real truth is always how dob bought a company cheaply when other’s were excluded despite offering more money, then if that was bad the ibrc supervised a shareholder payout for a loss making company which had 100+ million wrote off all funded and paid for by the taxpayer
That’s a very mature response well done
The fact they are all giving different stories about what was going on makes me think something was and something’s not right. Why else to be all going after each other. What and who is someone trying to hide?
Brian,
You’re right that the corporate interests like the bankers and their political enablers did run the country into the ground for the majority though not themselves of course. That inside elite departed the scene of destruction with bulging pockets and pensions.
But it’s not correct to say that Ireland went to the Troika “cap in hand looking for money”. As the 2 year blanket bank guarantee was close to expiring during the summer of 2010 , it had become obvious that the scale of bank losses would bankrupt the nation. Therefore the government belatedly attempted to impose some losses on the bondholders. This was ruled out by the ECB (assisted by U.S Treasury secretary Geithner to protect U.S. credit default swap interests) and they forced the Irish government into the Troika ‘bailout’ (read stitch up). This ensured full repayment of all bank bondholders from senior secured right down to junior unsecured under threat of withdrawal of all liquidity funding from the Irish banks as per the Trichet letters.
It should be also understood that the only reason that Trichet and Geithner could bully Ireland into the bailout is that we have ceded our monetary sovereignty to the ECB. A sovereign currency issuing state such as the U.K., Denmark, New Zealand etc. can never run out of its own currency and go bankrupt as they issue that currency at will. The U.K can sustain any size of debt or deficit which is denominated in sterling. The ‘debt’ and any interest due is paid via keystrokes at the Bank of England. That is why the enormous £850 billion bank bailout in the U.K. did not bankrupt the nation as it did in Ireland’s case and why the EU holds no stick over Britain, Denmark etc.
The Eurozone countries in contrast have ceded monetary sovereignty and so have a budget constraint imposed by Europe and a central bank the ECB which acts contrary to their national interests much of the time. The Troika is no friend of ordinary Irish people.
“The E.U. is an illegal organisation in Irleand now – they can be summarily arrested the second they touch ground in Eirie – for questioning like !”
Under which legislation is the EU now illegal?
Have I missed an important piece of legislation passed through the Oireachtas recently?
@ Waddler: And yet much of the damage to the Irish economy was done by Irish politicians – we voted for lower taxes and increased public spending on the back of a property boom. Yes that property boom was caused by low Eurozone interest rates, however tighter regulation of lending practices and tighter supervision of bank balance sheets could have prevented much of the damage. However a weak Central Bank and a Financial Regulator with limited sanctioning powers were put in place by the then government…
I get bored of the fallacy that it was all Europe’s fault… Ireland’s elite were just as culpable if not more culpable than Europe for the crash of 2007 onwards.
Waddler, good piece. CDS’ s/Asset Backed Securities/Re-Hypothecation enabled by the Clinton repeal of the Glass Steagall Act in 1999 laid the foundations for the enormous increase in bank debt/leveraging from 1999-2007 at which point the bubble burst as banks realized they were way over-leveraged stopped trusting each other and caused the collapse of the Inter-Bank market : result economic collapse. The ECB may have a legal case to answer regarding forced conditionality to repay bondholders. One thing is sure the ECB kick you hardest when you are down. They also recently moved into the Giant newly built office in the EU in Frankfurt at a cost of well over €1bln. Insane-but no shortage of cash :)
Ryan, the whole Western world had lax regulation. Anglo-Irish Bank should have gone to the wall after being given tons of loans from German-French banks. Those banks have a duty to risk assess/manage. They profit so should take the hit if they lend irresponsibly-it’s called capitalism. The ECB forced Ireland to repay banking debts to private institution-a new form of Communism=u can’t lose. Didn’t happen in New York with Lehman Bros Bank and it shouldn’t have happened here. The Lehmann guy was thrown in jail. I’ve not seen this Govt. Do much to reduce the cost of Govt. Still a gravy train w/ waste-inefficiency-high salaries-high pensions: Labour/Tg are even promising pay hikes back to boom time levels in public service!
Ciaran you say it was bought cheaply so you must know the real value of it. How much should it have fetched and what do you base that on?
Ryan,
I didn’t absolve Ireland’s elite from blame. That elite have always served the interest of domestic and international capital over those of the majority. This was reflected in the property bubble and inevitable bust which resulted in the banking system collapse and blanket guarantee which ultimately drove the nation into the Troika austerity program. The bubble, bank bailout and austerity have all resulted in an enormous movement of wealth from ordinary people up the pyramid to those that reside at the top.
That political and corporate elite also of course drove Ireland into the Euro currency union in the first place. This has effectively placed a household budget constraint on the nation where government spending must be funded via taxation. This limitation does not apply to a sovereign currency issuing state which has no financial constraint within the domestic currency. In this case, the state can afford to buy whatever resources are for sale in the domestic currency. So if doctors and nurses are available for work, the state can afford to hire them to staff the health service, ditto for building hospitals, schools, public transport, water network etc.
This macro economic reality was never explained to the population when they ratified the Maastricht, Nice, Lisbon treaties etc. The population can’t be blamed for making bad democratic choices when they do so in a fog of misinformation peddled by elite vested interests.
not true brian. the ECB repaid their bondholder friends their own gambling losses, and charged us for the privilege, provided we set up water privatisation, so we can buy our water back from whomever of their friends gets their greasy mitts on it. We never received a red cent…
This whole thing is a confidence scam, with our own successive governments propping up the whole thing, just to keep their obscene wages, expenses and multiple pensions coming…
Muppets are funny and amusing and maybe slightly foolish. These gangsters are far from being any of the abov. Please stop insulting the Muppets!
Can we bring in an international fraud squad with 0 connections to all the above? This KPMG crap is like getting Tony soprano to investigate junior soprano
Noonan likes Goldman Sachs when it comes to financial advice , nuff said.
Gerry Ryan the civil servant who prepared the Annsbacher Document should head up the team that sorts this ……..
And remember not a squeak out of one County Manager when 2/3s of all the revenue they collected for the car tax was transferred to Irish Water .
Note -
If so much as a hair on Gerry Ryan’s head is touched ………..
The whole thing is corrupthttps://youtu.be/27UL3tZW1bk
Dukes must be very worried that the possibility of criminality may arise?
Kevin i am 100% for that too, but i dint think it will happen same old same old
This guy is on the money!…… https://www.facebook.com/liam.deegan2/posts/840533292649940
Wouldn’t a civil servant be right to think that Anglo was the enemy? generations of irish people will be paying for its mistakes
Most of the givernement and bankers are just as bad as each other. I honestly have no faith or trust in either of them. Their own pockets are all that matter to them
Selective memorie’s
If another public enquiry is announced am voting Sinn Féin. Sick to death of it. This is a matter for the gardai. End of
I wonder how many people have rang the guards and reported this scam and gotten a pulse id number. I bet nobody has.
Maybe we should.
Fkg Dirtballs.. enda kenny joan burton and phil hogan should be locked up for life.
We will follow your lead Alan .
Labour are trying to stop on-line public conversation.
https://soundmigration.wordpress.com/2015/04/20/labour-censorship-ireland-social-media/
Disgusting, they bring these two Orwellian bills out, ostensibly to stop online bullying when in reality it is do with censoring public opinion online. Both odious -Rabbittes bill in particular threatening a €75,000 fine and/or 5 years in prison along with the removal of your computer or smartphone. Why is the Labour party so keen to bring this in?
I liked this comment. It really does highlight what could potentailly happen if these really (and I never use the word but I think it is appropriate here) Orwellian laws were to be introduced:
Pat Rabbitte’s bill allows the state to seize laptops, mobiles phones and modems etc etc to be taken from you.
So imagine you send a tweet sugggesting Pat Rabbitte was a bit of a hypocrite condemning political organisations with links to paramilitaries who murdered people, given his own political history. Granted that might be hard to fit into 140 characters, but imagine it was possible for the sake of an example. And say Pat Rabbitte was a litigious sort of character who didn’t want to be publicly associated with any of the murders, bank robberies or lots of stuff the Official IRA was involved in when he was member of the Workers Party, the political wing of the OIRA.
I guess you’d be into a couple of tweets now, something that might be construed by Rabbitte and his expensive legal team and barristers as “persistent and without legitimate cause”. It probably might not matter that you feel it important to public discourse that many younger people ought know that that a former minister – responsible for promoting austerity and a gagging law – was once a member of a politico-paramilitary organisation that murdered people. You might even infer that the Stalinist tendencies embodied in WP/OIRA back in the day could be found in a bill that seeks to quash public online political dissent today by actually making it illegal to be a political nuisance.
So you are taken to court and found guilty. Say your day job was a graphic designer, or architect or any other job that requires a laptop and/or mobile phone and access to the net. Your ability to earn a wage (or get donations) relies on these things. Rabbitte’s bill allows for a judge to remove that wage earning ability by seizing the tools of your trade.
Because Lorraine Higgins cant get elected ,she is embittered toward the people who are stopping her snout getting in the trough.
The attorney General is a Labour appointee !
One thinks of the mention of a prominent female legal figure in a trail recently and wonders……
GE & Fraud squad ASAP!
No point Alan,the cancerous parasites own them as well as the garda and the judges.
The electorate are the only defence against these vermin.
The new gardai commissioner wouldn’t allow the gardai get involved for fear of being fired….
Suppose so.. I.ll rejoin the heard like a good lil sheep.
This arrogant shower of parasites will be begging the herd to vote for them soon.
They will knock on doors and lie through their teeth while promising the sun,moon & stars in order to get their pig snouts into the trough.
Desperate to keep a lid on this and prevent FG from being smeared with the same sleazy brush as FF. Imagine how terrified thay all must be if say SF, and a load of Independents got in and delved into this a lot further?
I’d say the shredding machines are working overtime
Hit the nail on the head there brenda
A very intelligently phrased opening salvo from John Moran.
Well said Paul. And not a conspiracy theory in your comment. I’m surprised you weren’t reported!!
I’d describe it as “The Hill Street Blues” opening… for those who can remember the morning roll call.
All the evidence is now computerised and in the vaults of the C.I.A. and MI 5 – and soon those who thought they could sell out their neighbours are going to be knifed in the back by those they thought would protect them !
One thing for sure nobody will be made accountable for the biggest fraud in our history. They will circle the wagons and pretend to be angry at each other. These parasites will start arguing about their “Good names” while the people of this country are being stripped of their assets.
Corruption corruption
Anglo Irish Bank were the enemy.
Sometimes the Title says it all ” Anglo” – British ?
Sick of all of them. Force an election by boycotting iw and a no vote in endas referendums. Then vote for people like Catherine Murphy. Enda and Joan cannot remain in office if they lose 4 referendums. It will be a clear ,strong message from the people of no confidence in endas government. Media and opposition will force them out.we will pay for it if they are there for another 13 months.
Mr Moran and his high ranking civil servant colleagues seem to have got a new found interest in their jobs. Pity they weren’t so interested in what was going on in the banks when said banks were running amok and bringing this country to its knees. The reason so much is spent on consultants is because the civil servants aren’t up to the job. Moran wanted a place on the board of IBRC and when he didn’t get it the knives came out.
Sick of all of them. Force an election by boycotting iw and a no vote in endas referendums. Then vote for people like Catherine Murphy. Enda and Joan cannot remain in office if they lose 4 referendums. It will be a clear ,strong message from the people of no confidence in endas government. Media and opposition will force them out.
That’s the second time you’ve posted this comment. I can’t believe that you’re advocating No votes in the upcoming referendums just to “punish” the government, when in fact the people that would be punished are gay people who want to get married and under 35 yr olds who want to run for the Presidency!!
Hyenas squabbling over carcass as the main predator left with most of the spoils.
Do we actually need politicians at all? Every one promises everything in opposition and then when in government finds some excuse how things suddenly can’t be done. I would have though that being in opposition would be an opportunity to research all the facts and figures beforehand to hold the government of the day to account. It seems that our politicians are too occupied with parish pump issues than to actually deal with matters of national importance.
I think Poland was right to resist pressure from Brussels over the past 10 years to join the Euro. Other Non-EU Nations seem to be delighted they stayed out eg. Sweden-Denmark-Norway-Switzerland-UK. The Euro has been bad for Ireland.
The pressure is on government.
Add to that pressure by boycotting iw and voting no in endas referendums. To lose 4 referendums will be a clear,strong message from the people of no confidence in endas government. It will push them over the edge,GE guaranteed.
Nobody cared if Anglo-Irish Bank went to the wall. The reason the ECB forced the bailout of Anglo on us was to protect the Inter-Bank market in Europe. Why? Well acc. ZEROHEDGE Apr2014 report DB (Deutsche Bank) has “World’s Largest Exposure” to Derivatives at a whopping €75TRILLION. WALL Street’s JPM (JP Morgan) in 2nd place at about €70Trillion. With that level of exposure (DB Equity Dilution only 10%!!). You can see how even “minor” contagion from Anglo Irish Bank going bankrupt would cost DB massively. Hence the ECB requirement for Ireland to bail out Anglo.
Michel Martin speaking on Alan Dukes and arrogance? Pot, kettle, etc. Fianna Fáil wrote the book on “sleeveenery”. Fine Gael are just adding some refinements of their own.
Begrudgery against Dob? Are you having a laugh.
Heard Alan Dukes being interviewed on RTE 1 radio today and what he said made sense. The €150m owed by Siteserve was gone down the toilet just like so many other Celtic Tiger era bad investments in the property bubble. It was not there to be recovered and getting €50m cash from Denis O’Brien was a lot better than the alternatives which included wasting time with bidders who did not have hard cash or O’Brien’s clear vision of how to get Siteserve back into profitable operation, and bankruptcy. The charges of malpractice are starting to look like just political posturing and begrudgeary aimed at Denn O’Brien. Of course the long suffering taxpayer will now pick up the tab for all the €300 per hour investigations by auditors. Socialists again doing what they do best; destroying the people’s wealth by wasting it on non-productive state (taxpayer) funded pet projects. I’ll be surprised if a single significant prosecution of any wrongdoer results from the millions this charade will cost, unless a journalist gets jailed for writing something out of turn.
have your say