Mexican president says Netanyahu willing to help in case of 43 missing students

Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Friday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated he would be willing to collaborate to hand over a former Mexican law enforcement official wanted in connection with the 2014 disappearance and suspected murders of 43 students in southern Mexico, as well as the coverup of the events.

The former official, Tomas Zeron, was the director of Mexico’s Criminal Investigation Agency, whom Mexican authorities accuse of compromising the investigation into the disappearances. He is also accused of embezzling over $50 million and torturing suspects. Zeron fled to Israel after the investigation into the mass abduction was reopened following the election of Obrador in 2019. Zeron has been in Israel since and has applied for asylum, as Mexico has sought his extradition.

Obrador had requested Israel’s help in 2021, writing to former premier Naftali Bennett on the matter, and later to Netanyahu.

On Friday, Obrador said during his daily press conference that he “just received a letter from the Prime Minister of Israel about his interest in helping us.”

Because one of the people who participated in covering up the crime… is in Israel,” Obrador said, referring to Zeron. “We are asking for him to be extradited,” he said, without mentioning whether Israel had agreed to the extradition request.

Last year, The New York Times reported that the head of a commission investigating the 2014 disappearance flew to Israel to try to convince Zeron to cooperate. According to the report, a month after Mexico submitted an extradition request, head of the commission Alejandro Encinas traveled to Israel and had a nearly three-hour lunch in Tel Aviv with Zeron where he “pleaded” with him to provide more information on the case and offered the “president’s support” in exchange for any new information about the remains of the students.

In an interview with the newspaper, Encinas said he believed Zeron may have valuable information and was only promising the president’s support that could include a reduced prison sentence.

In the wake of the 2014 disappearance of the students, an investigative team headed by Zeron concluded, just weeks after the fact, that police had handed the group of students, who were en route to a demonstration, to a local drug cartel. The criminals then killed the group, and burned and disposed of their bodies in a river.

International investigators later refuted Zeron’s account, discovering that the government had both tampered with existing evidence and extracted new evidence through torture.

Zeron stepped down in 2016 after a video was revealed showing him handling evidence that was apparently never officially recorded.

A lawyer for Zeron, Liora Turlevsky, was quoted in the Times as saying that her client denied all accusations and is not withholding any evidence connected to the students.

A Mexican official told the Times in 2021 that Zeron had received assistance from Israeli firms he has ties to, such as controversial private intelligence firm NSO Group, whose spyware the fugitive reportedly authorized for use.

NSO denied ever assisting Zeron, and the Times said no direct proof of the allegation was provided. An international media investigative effort called The Cartel Project reported that he had fled to Israel with help from his contacts in the country’s cyber-surveillance industry.

The report said Encinas made the trip to Israel to meet with Zeron because he was under pressure for an announcement on the case, even though investigators had not concluded their investigations.

Two months after the meeting, the commission received a trove of WhatsApp messages that seemed to provide a breakthrough in the case. However, Encinas said that much of it cannot be validated.

In September 2022, a group of international experts denounced the rush to show results, and raised doubts about some evidence included in the report by the government’s Truth Commission investigating the case.

The Truth Commission’s report in August 2022 included new information about the military’s involvement in the disappearances, including screen captures of messages indicating that military personnel allegedly gave the order to kill some of the students and hid their remains.

The experts, however, raised doubts about those messages, which they said were written very differently from messages intercepted by US authorities.

At the time, Encinas said that “no one has pressured me” and that “there are not political times” in the case, adding that the issues raised by the independent experts can be addressed.

The disappearance of the 43 teaching students shocked Mexico and sparked mass protests against then-president Pena Nieto’s government.

The students had taken five buses to travel to a demonstration but were stopped by corrupt police in the city of Iguala, Guerrero and handed over to a drug cartel.

Prosecutors initially said the cartel mistook the students for members of a rival gang and killed them before incinerating their bodies at a garbage dump and tossing the remains in a river.

However, independent experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights rejected the government’s conclusion, and the families of the victims continue to demand answers.

In September 2021, Israel’s embassy in Mexico City was vandalized by demonstrators calling on Israel to extradite Zeron. The demonstrators defaced the embassy with graffiti slogans including “Death to Israel.”

Agencies contributed to this report.