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| Fugitive Mexican Mayor and Wife Are Detained in Case of Missing Students | Fugitive Mexican Mayor and Wife Are Detained in Case of Missing Students |
| (about 4 hours later) | |
| MEXICO CITY — The fugitive mayor of a southern Mexico town where 43 college students were apparently abducted in September after he reportedly ordered the police to attack them has been detained along with his wife, a federal official said on Tuesday. | |
| José Ramón Salinas, a spokesman for the federal police, said on Twitter that Mayor Jose Luis Abarca of Iguala, who stepped down from his post and fled last month as the police focused on him, and his wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda Villa, had been arrested in Mexico City, 120 miles north of Iguala, but gave no other details. | |
| Mexican news organizations said they had been arrested in a raid by an elite police unit in the congested, working-class Iztapalapa neighborhood. The house shown in the reports was modest and somewhat run down, and reporters entering the property found several abandoned dogs. | |
| The couple were arrested not long after midnight and taken to the federal attorney general’s office to undergo interrogation. | |
| Their detention could provide a pivotal break in a case that has frustrated the authorities since Sept. 26, when an outbreak of violence in Iguala left six people dead, including three students. The students, who were part of a large group from a left-wing teachers’ college with a history of provocative protest, were soliciting donations and stealing buses for transportation to a coming demonstration. | Their detention could provide a pivotal break in a case that has frustrated the authorities since Sept. 26, when an outbreak of violence in Iguala left six people dead, including three students. The students, who were part of a large group from a left-wing teachers’ college with a history of provocative protest, were soliciting donations and stealing buses for transportation to a coming demonstration. |
| “The detention of the ex-mayor of Iguala and his wife is a crucial advance in the search for our young teachers,” Rogelio Ortega, the interim governor of Guerrero State, said on Twitter. He was appointed to the post Oct. 27 after Gov. Ángel Aguirre stepped aside under intense criticism over his handling of the case, which exposed rampant local corruption. | |
| Mr. Abarca and his wife are believed to have close ties to a drug gang, Guerreros Unidos, which has been linked to corruption in the Iguala police force and several others in Guerrero State. | |
| Out of concern that the students would disrupt a speech his politically aspiring wife was giving in the town’s central plaza, Mr. Abarca ordered the police to “teach them a lesson,” Mexican news media reports said, citing documents in the investigation. | |
| Six people were killed when the police opened fire. Witnesses reported that several students were put in police vehicles and driven away. The authorities have said they believe that the students were eventually turned over to the drug gang. Altogether, 43 are unaccounted for. | Six people were killed when the police opened fire. Witnesses reported that several students were put in police vehicles and driven away. The authorities have said they believe that the students were eventually turned over to the drug gang. Altogether, 43 are unaccounted for. |
| President Enrique Peña Nieto has said that solving the case is his top priority. The authorities have made several arrests, rounding up large numbers of police officers, and have uncovered several mass graves containing 38 bodies in and around Iguala. Initial tests, however, showed that the bodies were not those of the students, and relatives, who recently met with Mr. Peña Nieto, and their supporters are angered by the lack of progress. | |
| Despite numerous arrests, the authorities have come up empty in the search for the students. Last week, after arresting members of the gang believed to have been directly involved in the abduction, they rushed to a garbage dump near Iguala, stoking a news media frenzy, but a search did not turn up the students. | |
| Federal officials said the Guerreros Unidos gang regularly paid off the mayor for his cooperation and that of the police force, which acted as muscle for the gang. He received up to $220,000 every few weeks, the officials have said, while his wife was described as a top operative of the gang. It is an offshoot of the larger, better-known Beltrán Leyva crime group in which her brothers — two of whom were killed in 2009 — have acted as leaders. | |
| The mayor is also a suspect in the killing of a political activist last year. | |
| Guerreros Unidos specializes in kidnapping, extortion and growing and preparing opium poppies to be refined into heroin for the American drug market. |