MEXICO CITY — Mexican authorities said Tuesday they have fully confirmed the match between a bone fragment and a student missing since 2014.
Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz was one of 43 students who were detained by police and turned over to a drug gang in September 2014. The gang members allegedly believed the students worked for a rival gang, and killed them.
Guerrero de la Cruz had initially been partly identified by DNA analysis at the University of Innsbruck in Austria in 2015. That analysis said the bone most probably belonged to someone related to his mother. But the more definitive Innsbruck test results announced Tuesday firmly established it was Guerrero de la Cruz.
Authorities in 2014 and 2015 claimed that many of the students bodies had been burned in a giant pyre at a trash dump, but the bone fragments in the most recent test did not show signs of having been burned.
In 2020, Mexican authorities identified the remains of another of the 43 students, Christian Alfonso RodrÃguez Telumbre, again through DNA analysis at the University of Innsbruck.
The remains of a third student, Alexander Mora, were identified in December 2014.
On Sept. 26, 2014, students from the teachers college at Ayotzinapa in the southern state of Guerrero were abducted by local police in the town of Iguala. Many of the suspects in the case have since been released because of evidence that authorities tortured them during interrogation.
