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UN expresses solidarity to family of missing Mexican student identified this week

THE UN human rights office in Mexico has expressed “deep solidarity” with the relatives of a student whose body was finally identified earlier this week.

The identification is a major development in one of the country’s most notorious unresolved cases.

Christian Alfonso Rodriguez was one of the 43 Ayotzinapa students who were kidnapped and disappeared in September 2014 en route to a demonstration.

He is only the second of those missing to have been identified, using DNA analysis carried out at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.

The Mexican Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said: “It will be essential that the Mexican state continues to provide reliable responses to families.”

Its representative, Jesus Pena, said the identification of Mr Rodriguez was “a first step to know the truth,” as it rules out the official version of events in which the students were murdered by a drug gang and cremated in a rubbish tip.

Omar Gomez Trejo, head of the special unit which is reinvestigating the case, said the bones had not been found where previous botched investigations had suggested.

“It was not tossed or found in the Cocula dump, nor in the San Juan River like the previous administration held up publicly and legally,” he said.

“With this new discovery … the ‘historic truth’ is over.”

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