Mexico City, Mar 1 (EFE).– The bodies of the five young people who disappeared on Jan. 11 in Tierra Blanca, a town in the Mexican Gulf state of Veracruz, were burned, grounded down and thrown into a river, officials said Tuesday, citing a statement given by former police officer Ruben Perez, one of the suspects in the case, to investigators.

“Based on the information that we have, (the young people) were burned, later grinded down, likely in a sugar mill, and thrown into a small river,” Government Undersecretary for Human Rights Roberto Campa told Televisa.

The relatives of the five victims – four young men and a 16-year-old girl – were told what happened on Monday, Campa said.

Relatives were “informed of the arrest and handover to a judge of an eighth” state police officer, whose statement was “very relevant” because “he was present at practically all the key moments” on Jan. 11, the government undersecretary for human rights said.

The young people were arrested by state police at a gas station in Tierra Blanca, a town in central Veracruz, as they returned from vacation, with the incident caught by security cameras and witnessed by a neighbor of one of the young men.

The group was arrested “simply because (the officers) found them to be suspicious,” Campa said.

Perez was with the state police commander in Tierra Blanca, Marcos Conde, when the chief was informed of the arrests, the government undersecretary for human rights said.

Conde told Perez to go to another location, where the former officer saw the young people before they were taken “to a third spot,” where “the kids were questioned initially,” Campa said.

Perez then went to the El Limon ranch, where the young people were questioned, “deprived of their lives and the process of making the bodies disappear started,” the government undersecretary for human rights said.

Francisco Navarrete Serna, a suspected member of the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion and the gang’s boss in Tierra Blanca, is also under arrest.

Campa acknowledged that the Tierra Blanca case was similar to the one involving the disappearance of nearly four dozen education students in the southern state of Guerrero.

On the night of Sept. 26, 2014, police in the city of Iguala attacked students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School, a nearby teachers training institution, after the aspiring educators had commandeered buses that they planned to use to travel to Mexico City for a protest.

Six people – including three students – were killed and 43 other students were abducted that night.

Federal officials say the incident was the work of corrupt municipal cops acting on the orders of Iguala’s crooked mayor.

The cops handed over the students to Guerreros Unidos cartel gunmen, who killed the young people and burned their bodies at a garbage dump in the neighboring town of Cocula, according to the official story.

But the parents of the missing students reject that account and a report issued last September by a group of independent experts working for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights cited multiple irregularities in the investigation.

Among other things, the experts concluded that “no evidence exists to support the theory” that 43 bodies were incinerated at the dump on Sept. 27, 2014, the day after the students disappeared. EFE