Mexican President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, reiterated on Tuesday, that the investigation into the disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa is ongoing.

Mexico City.- His statements came after it was recently revealed that Mexico’s armed forces knew that 43 student teachers who disappeared in 2014 were being kidnapped by criminals, then hid evidence that could have helped locate them.

A former Colombian prosecutor, Angela Buitrago, said the group of independent experts found evidence that authorities withheld or falsified evidence from the start of the search.

Buitrago said investigators, prosecutors, and military personnel altered crime scenes and records. A government drone video obtained by the experts showed marines and police climbing around the area where the students were allegedly killed with little control.

The students from a radical teachers’ college were abducted by local police in southern Guerrero state who presumably killed them and burned their bodies.

But the students were under surveillance because their college, which has strong ties to leftwing social movements in Mexico, was viewed as a hotbed of subversion, according to experts.

After the abduction, investigators sought to quickly resolve the crime through illegal searches, detentions, and torture of suspects.

Meanwhile, Mexico has asked the Israeli government to extradite a former top security official, Tomás Zerón, who was the head of the federal investigation agency at the time of the abduction. He is being sought on charges of torture and covering up those disappearances. (RHC)