Rights body wants to talk to army over Mexico missing

Experts from a regional human rights body said Thursday the fate of 43 Mexican students who disappeared in September remains unclear and they want to interview soldiers about the case.
The Mexican attorney general's office has declared that the 43 young men were slaughtered by a drug gang in league with corrupt police in the southern state of Guerrero.
But the five experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, in Mexico since March 1 to investigate the case, said they will review the official investigation and examine all the evidence.
"We still do not have any certainty about what happened with the 43 student-teachers," commission member Carlos Beristain said at a news conference in Mexico City.
Only one student has been identified among charred remains found in a landfill and a river near the city of Iguala, where the 43 were abducted on the night of September 26-27.
Parents of the students, who are touring the United States to seek support for their cause, have rejected the government's conclusion and continue leading protests that have rattled President Enrique Pena Nieto's administration.
The rights commission, which is in Mexico with the government's consent, has requested interviews with soldiers from the 27th Battalion, which has a base in Iguala.
Relatives say they suspect that the army could have had some sort of role in the disappearance of the students, or at least failed to come to their rescue during the police attack. The government says the army had no role in the crime.
The rights commission wants to talk to soldiers because there are "aspects" of the case that can be "deepened," including allegations that troops were at a clinic where wounded students were taken, Beristain said.
The experts said Mexican prosecutors should treat the case as an "enforced disappearance," a case in which an authority is involved in an abduction.