Mexico arrests three soldiers for ties to missing students case

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Three members of Mexico's army have been arrested for alleged connection to the disappearance of 43 students in southern Mexico in 2014, the government announced Thursday.

Assistant Public Safety Secretary Ricardo Mejia said that among those arrested was the commander of the army base in Iguala, Guerrero in September 2014, when the students from a radical teacher's college were abducted.

Mejía said a fourth arrest was expected soon.

Mejía did not give the names of those arrested, but the commander of the Iguala base at that time was Colonel José Rodríguez Pérez.

Last month, a government truth commission re-investigating the case issued a report that named Rodríguez as being allegedly responsible for the disappearance of six of the students.

Interior Undersecretary Alejandro Encinas, who led the commission, said last month that six of the missing students were allegedly kept alive in a warehouse for days and then turned over to Rodríguez who ordered them killed.

The report had called the disappearances a “state crime,” emphasising that authorities had been closely monitoring the students from the teachers' college at Ayotzinapa from the time they left their campus through their abduction by local police in the town of Iguala that night.

A soldier who had infiltrated the school was among the abducted students, and Encinas asserted the army did not follow its own protocols and try to rescue him.

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