MEXICO CITY (AP) — A court docket in Mexico sentenced 11 former police officers to 50 years in jail every for the 2021 slayings of 17 migrants and two Mexican voters, government stated Tuesday.
The ex-officers have been convicted previous this 12 months of murder and abuse of authority. A twelfth officer was once convicted best of abuse of authority and sentenced to 19 years in jail, stated Assistant Public Safety Secretary Luis Rodríguez Bucio.
The officers have been members of an elite police group in the northern state of Tamaulipas, around the border from Texas.
They had to begin with argued they have been responding to pictures fired and believed they have been chasing the automobiles of one of the country’s drug cartels, which often take part in migrant smuggling.
Police had burned the sufferers’ our bodies in an try to duvet up the crime. The our bodies have been discovered piled in a charred pickup truck in Camargo, around the Rio Grande from Texas, in a space that has been bloodied for years by means of turf battles between the remnants of the Gulf cartel and the previous Zetas cartel.
Most of the lifeless migrants have been from rural, indigenous farming communities in Guatemala. Relatives stated they misplaced touch with 13 of the migrants as they traveled towards the United States.
The truck maintaining the our bodies had 113 bullet affects, however government have been at a loss for words by means of the truth that virtually no spent shell casings have been discovered on the scene. It later got here out that the state police officers concerned in the killings knew their shell casing would possibly give them away, in order that they it appears picked them up.
The officers have been individuals of the 150-member Special Operations Group, identified by means of its Spanish initials as GOPES, an elite state police unit which, below every other title, had up to now been implicated in different human rights abuses. The unit has since been disbanded.
So fearsome was once the unit’s popularity that the U.S. govt, which skilled a couple of of its person individuals, sought on the time to distance itself from the pressure, which it referred to each by means of its former initials, CAIET, and GOPES.
The U.S. Embassy in Mexico City stated in 2021 that 3 of the 12 officers charged in the migrant bloodbath “received basic skills and/or first-line supervisor training” via a State Department program sooner than they have been assigned to the particular unit. “The training of these individuals took place in 2016 and 2017 and were fully compliant” with laws on vetting over human rights issues, the embassy stated.
The killings revived reminiscences of the ugly 2010 bloodbath of 72 migrants close to the city of San Fernando in the similar gang-ridden state. But the ones killings have been finished by means of a drug cartel, whilst the 2021 slayings have been performed by means of regulation enforcement.
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