Mexico's president pledges no impunity in case of 43 missing students

Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto addresses the audience during his third State of the Union address at the National Palace in Mexico City September 2, 2015. [Photo/Agencies]

MEXICO CITY -- Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto Monday pledged there would be no impunity in the unresolved case of 43 Mexican students missing and believed massacred in September last year.

The statement came a day after the results of a six-month investigation by an independent body completely contradicted the official version of the events that led to the students' disappearance in the southern state of Guerrero.

Pena Nieto said, "110 people have been arrested and we will not relent until all who are guilty of this very regrettable event are brought before the law."

"I am the first to take full interest -- not just as president, but because Mexican society demands it, and they are right -- in finding out what really happened," the president said at a ceremony inaugurating a stretch of highway in the central state of Puebla.

The report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and its group of independent experts debunked the main conclusion presented months ago by Mexico's Attorney General's Office (PGR), which claimed the students had been killed and incinerated over two days (Sept. 26 and Sept.27) at a garbage dump near the town of Iguala in Guerrero by members of a local drug trafficking gang who believed the youth were from a rival criminal ring.

The head of the PGR at the time, Jesus Murillo Karam, said "that is the historical truth," and moved to close the case, but officials were never able to present the forensic evidence to back up their version.