Commission: No Evidence 43 Missing Students in Mexico Are Alive

"There is no indication that the students are alive. On the contrary, all the testimonies and evidence accredit that they were artfully killed and disappeared," said the president of the Truth Commission and undersecretary of Human Rights of the federal government, Alejandro Encinas, in a press conference.

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Those are preliminary conclusions of the report presented hours before to mothers and fathers of the young students in the presence of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the Attorney General.

The report details that the Army, authorities in the city of Iguala, and other municipalities in the state of Guerrero knew in real time of the attacks on five buses occupied by nearly a hundred young people by several police patrols as they traveled to Mexico City to the annual march for the 1968 Tlatelolco Square student massacre.

"All the authorities were informed of the taking of buses, of the arrival at the Central Bus Station (of Iguala), of the acts of persecution they were subjected to," continues the report read by the high official.

The authorities knew from when the students left the facilities of the Ayotzinapa rural teachers' normal school, some 120 kilometers from Iguala until the "disappearance order" was given.

That order was given at 22:45 local time (03:45 GMT) that night when police agents handed them over to the self-styled Guerreros Unidos criminal organization in cahoots with municipal police.

The omissions in which these civilian and military authorities incurred "accredit a level of responsibility, whether by action or omission because if they had intervened with the information they had, the disappearance and murder of the students would have been prevented," said Encinas.