Photo: Desinformémonos

By THE PULSE NEWS MEXICO STAFF

Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office (FGR) indicted two former investigative experts, Mauricio Cerón Solana and Patricia Gómez Ramírez, before a federal court late last week for allegedly altering and losing evidence of the search for the 43 education students from Ayotzinapa who disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero, in 2014.

This is the first time that the FGR acknowledged the alleged loss of evidence in the Iguala case, although in the past it has charged officials for altering evidence.

In a hearing before a Control Judge of the Federal Criminal Justice Center of the Eastern Prison on Thursday, Oct. 7, federal prosecutors accused the former forensic experts with both an alteration of the crime scene and the loss of evidence related to a criminal act.

The two were also charged with obstructing the investigation of the criminal act.

The Federal Prosecutor’s Office alleged that on Oct. 25, 2014, Cerón Solana and Gómez Ramírez complied with an “illegal order” from Tomás Zerón de Lucio — then head of the Criminal Investigation Agency (AIC) and now fighting extradition to Mexico from Israel to face charges — to alter the San Juan River area where three days later plastic bags with remains of the missing students were found.

Cerón Solana and Gómez Ramírez allegedly searched the area, removing sediments and mud until they found a black bag from which they extracted at least one human bone, which was later lost.

According to the FGR, the two experts never produced a report that materially and legally endorsed their activities at the scene, thus hindering the investigation of the criminal act.

Cerón Solana and Gómez Ramírez were expected to have a preliminary hearing in their case on Tuesday, Oct. 12.

The Ayotzinapa case has never been solved and is still under investigation seven years after the students’ disappearance.