Number of Students Missing in Southern Mexico Cut to 43, Rights Body Says

“They have been found in different parts of the state, some in their homes, others went to the Normal (School in Ayotzinapa), where their classmates are,” commission chairman Ramon Navarrete told Efe.

Mexico’s normal schools train future primary-school instructors.

“When they have clashes, in an effort to protect themselves and evade the police, they disperse” to make it more difficult for the security forces to find them, Navarrete said.

“This situation is different” since “there were people killed” in the incidents that started in the city of Iguala on Friday, when a group of police officers attacked a gathering of students, killing three young people, Navarrete said.

More than 20 classmates were taken away in patrol cars with the numbers 017, 018, 020, 022 and 028, a student told Efe, adding that “nothing has been heard from them.”

Three people, including a minor, were killed in another attack on Friday night targeting a bus carrying the Third-Division Avispones soccer team from Chilpancingo.

Ayotzinapa Normal School student representative Uriel Alonso Solis told Radio Formula that 13 missing students turned up and only 43 were listed as missing now.

On Monday, classmates of the missing students pelted the state capitol with rocks and demanded the resignation of Gov. Angel Aguirre.

Some 3,000 students, teachers and family members of the missing young people marched peacefully to the legislative building in Chilpancingo, Guerrero’s capital.

But during a protest in front of the capitol, youths wearing hoods broke through the security barriers and hurled rocks at the building, destroying the glass facade. Police did not intervene.

The protesters demanded justice for the six people killed last weekend in Iguala, including the three education students.