A NEW independent report has challenged the Mexican government account of 43 teaching students’ disappearance last year, including the claim that their bodies were burnt.

Attorney General Arely Gomez, who was not in office during the initial investigation, said that, in the light of the report released on Sunday, she would call for a new forensic review of the municipal rubbish dump where the initial probe concluded the 43 had been burnt to ash beyond any possibility of identification.

The government claimed the September 26 attack had been a case of mistaken identity.

But the report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights concluded that it was a violent and co-ordinated reaction to the students hijacking buses to travel to a demonstration and that they may have unknowingly interfered with a drug shipment on one of the buses.

The commission is a Washington-based branch of the Organisation of American States.