A PROBE has found that the Mexican army did not act to stop the abduction of 43 students despite being aware of it happening.

In 2014, the students disappeared in southern Mexico and the Truth Commission was established to find out what happened following a lack of official reports.

The local police from the town of Iguala, members of organised crime and authorities kidnapped rural teachers’ college Ayotzinapa students from buses as they commandeered it for their transportation.

The administration of then-president Enrique Pena Nieto said that the “historic truth” was that the students were turned over to a drug gang who killed them, incinerated their bodies at a dump in nearby Cocula and tossed the burnt remains into a river.

But investigations by independent experts, the attorney general’s office and the Truth Commission have since dismissed the claims but acknowledged that recovered burnt bone fragments have been used to identify three of the missing students.

Interior Undersecretary Alejandro Encinas, who leads the commission, called it a “state crime” in which officials from all levels of government were involved.

He said that the army is responsible “for action, omission or negligence.”

One of the abducted students was a soldier who had infiltrated the school and yet the army did not search for him even though it had real-time information about what was happening, he said.

Mr Encinas said that the inaction violated army protocols for cases of missing soldiers.

The Defence Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr Encinas also said that the highest official implicated in the case, Tomas Zeron, had been offered a deal in exchange for his co-operation.

Mr Zeron, who is considered the author of the Nieto administration’s version of events, is accused of torture and forced disappearance and is considered a fugitive while he resides in Israel.

Mr Encinas also revived the hypothesis that the origin of the abductions was tied to the region’s active drug trafficking.

He said that a bus that night had passed through 16 federal security checkpoints without being stopped, despite intercepted communications discussing “merchandise” that it was carrying.

“And the merchandise is either drugs or money,” he said.

The families of the disappeared have kept up pressure on the government over the years, demanding the investigation be kept open and expanded to include the military, which has a large base in Iguala yet did not intervene.