MEXICO has issued arrest warrants for 25 people accused of involvement in the abduction and killing of 43 students in 2014.

The development “gives hope that finally, the new government is making sure that the families of the victims find real justice,” Justice Mexico Now said today.

Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero marked the sixth anniversary of the students’ disappearance by announcing that “those responsible for the forced disappearance of the 43 ... are fully identified.” He said their impending prosecution contrasted with “manipulation and cover-up” by the past administration of Enrique Pena Nieto.

Omar Gomez Trejo, the prosecutor leading the case of the students from the teachers' college at Ayotzinapa in Guerrero state, said one federal police officer was already in custody. 

Mr Gomez said that the “intellectual and material authors of the disappearance” were being rounded up and these included “police from various municipalities, federal police, members of the army.”

The students’ families have long demanded that soldiers be included in the investigation. Local police, other security forces and members of a drug gang abducted the students in Iguala, Guerrero on the night of September 26 2014. 

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, nicknamed Amlo, said: “He who has participated and is shown to have done so is going to be judged. There will be no cover-up.”

Campaign group Justice Mexico Now told the Morning Star: “Instead of investigating what truly happened that night, Pena Nieto’s government tortured its way to confessions in order to construct a fake — yet convenient — account.

“Thanks to Amnesty International, who got testimony about the torture and leaked videos, we know the ‘historic truth’ of the past government was merely a lie. 

“We believe that, finally, Amlo’s government is slowly uncovering these illegal practices central to how ‘justice’ was previously procured in Mexico.” The group said that this ought to inspire reform of the prosecution system in the country to “tackle the huge rate of impunity in cases of corruption, forced disappearances and torture.”

But it said the case was far from settled, quoting Mexico’s Interior Ministry’s Under-Secretary for Human Rights Alejandro Encinas: “The only truth right now is that there is yet no absolute truth, and the government will not construct any definitive story if it is not sustained by evidence obtained legally, and in co-ordination with victims’ families.”