Mexican mayor and wife detained in case of 43 missing students

Mexican officials say federal police have detained the former mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca, and his wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda, who are said to have ordered the Sept. 26 attacks on teachers’ college students that left six dead and 43 missing in Guerrero state.

The couple's detention could shed light on the student disappearances, which remain a mystery and have prompted international condemnation and mass protests in cities across Mexico. 

Mexican media reported that Abarca was held on three warrants: for attempted homicide for the 43 missing students, for homicide linked to the killing of three people during clashes after the students’ disappearance and for the alleged assassination of a local leader in 2013.

The couple was in the custody of the Mexican attorney general’s office, where they were to give statements.

The two were captured in a pre-dawn raid in the working-class Iztapalapa borough of Mexico City, according to the Mexican news website Animal Político. Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said 60 federal agents had staked out three houses, and were tipped off to the couple's presence by a female associate, Noemi Berumen, who apparently accompanied the couple or aided them in their flight from justice. Berumen was also detained in the Tuesday raids.

"The house they were found in looked as it were abandoned," Murillo Karam said. "The reason we started to suspect this person (Berumen) was that she appeared to be entering an abandoned house."

Dozens of Ayotzinapa students disappeared after an attack by police in Iguala, where they were protesting government education reforms that they said will make schooling unaffordable for the poor.

Authorities say Abarca ordered the raid, apparently because he thought the students wanted to interrupt a speech by Pineda. The attack was carried out by police working with the Guerreros Unidos criminal group, and authorities say Pineda was an operative in the gang.

The case led to the resignation of Guerrero’s Gov. Ángel Aguirre and the arrests of 56 people, including 22 Iguala police officers and 14 members of the municipal force in neighboring Cocula. The head of Guerreros Unidos, Sidronio Cassarrubias, was captured last month.

But the arrest of the mayor and his wife have not yet led to finding the students. "News like this just makes you angrier," said Mario Cesar Gonzalez, whose son, Cesar Manuel Gonzalez, is among the missing students. "I wish they would put the same intelligence services and effort into finding the students. The ineptitude is staggering."

 Some hoped the couple's detention would provide new leads.

"This was the missing piece. This arrest will help us find our kids," Felipe de la Cruz, the father of one of the missing students, told Milenio television. "It was the government who took our kids."

Mexico analysts have pointed to strong ties between local authorities and drug gangs. Students from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college said the collaboration has led to an atmosphere of impunity in Guerrero. In 2011 two students from the school were killed when police opened fire on them after they occupied a highway toll booth.

The search for the missing students has taken authorities to the hills above Iguala, where 30 bodies were found in mass graves but have not been identified so far as any of the students.

Classmates of the missing students have staged protests, taken over highway toll booths and occupied and burned municipal buildings in Guerrero over the disappearances. They have promised radical action if the students are not returned alive, often chanting at rallies in recent weeks, “They were taken alive. We want them returned alive!”

Al Jazeera and news services