by Our Foreign Desk

MEXICO’S National Human Rights Commission raised questions on Thursday over the government’s investigation into the disappearance of 43 student teachers last year.

The commission issued a list of 32 omissions in the investigation and recommendations that it said were vital to solving the case, even though the attorney general’s office gave its comprehensive official version of what happened in January.

The commission’s report lists key people and evidence, including a mobile phone message from one student sent after he was believed to have been kidnapped, which were not pursued after the disappearances in the southern city of Iguala last September.

“All of the things listed are not in the case file and so, in our view, have not been done,” commission president Luis Raul Gonzalez Perez said. “The attorney general’s investigation should not be closed and is not closed.”

The students at a teacher-training college in the state of Guerrero disappeared while commandeering buses to travel to a protest.

The attorney general’s office claims the students were arrested by local police and handed over to a drug cartel, which killed and incinerated them at a rubbish dump.

Their remains were allegedly put into rubbish bags and dumped in a nearby river.

But the commission said the federal investigation had not developed profiles of each of the missing students, including basic details such as blood type, fingerprints and distinguishing characteristics such as scars or tattoos, which it termed a “basic tool” of any search for remains.