Mexico City, Sep 24 (EFE).– Mexican authorities’ “reckless handling” of the investigation into the disappearance of 43 teacher trainees a year ago exposes “a scandalous cover-up orchestrated by the highest levels of government,” London-based human rights group Amnesty International said.

In a statement Wednesday, AI’s Americas director, Erika Guevara-Rosas, said the case had “exposed how anyone can be forcibly disappeared into thin air in the country with those in power focused on covering up the traces.”

The disappearance of the students enrolled at the Ayotzinapa Normal School, a teacher-training institution in the southern state of Guerrero, “is one of the worst human rights tragedies in Mexico’s recent history,” she added.

“Unless President (Enrique) Peña Nieto takes real action now, he will continue to be seen around the world as an enabler of horrors.”

Saturday will mark the one-year anniversary of the students’ disappearance from Iguala, a city located near the teachers’ college.

Police attacked the students as they traveled through the city on buses as part of a protest against education reforms, according to the official version, which says six people – including three students – were killed and 43 other students abducted.

Federal authorities say the incident was the work of corrupt municipal cops acting on the orders of a corrupt mayor with connections to the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel who wanted to prevent the students from interfering with an official event.

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

But the parents of the missing students and their supporters reject that account, which has also been criticized by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and other international organizations.

IACHR experts said in a report earlier this month that “no evidence exists to support the theory based on the statements that the 43 bodies were incinerated” at the dump on Sept. 27, 2014, the day after the students disappeared.

They cited work by Jose Torero, a well-known expert on fire who had conducted field work, examined the evidence and reviewed the statements of the suspects in the case.

The evidence gathered in the case shows that “the minimum amount of fire needed to cremate the bodies could not have occurred” at the dump in Cocula, not even enough to burn one body, the report said.

“The Mexican government’s unshakable determination to convince the world that the students were killed by a drug gang and their remains burned in a dumpster is distracting from any other valuable lines of investigation,” Guevara-Rosas said.

“In particular, they should look into the military and law enforcement agencies’ role in the tragedy after they failed to take action despite being aware of the abuses against the students as they were taking place,” she added.

Noting that Mexican authorities have prohibited independent experts from interviewing soldiers of the 27th infantry battalion, based in the town where the students were arrested, Guevara-Rosas said that action “raises alarming questions.”

“If the government is convinced the military do not have any relevant information to provide, what are they so worried about?” she asked rhetorically.

The AI statement also notes that “declassified intelligence documents have since revealed that military officers in Iguala knew about the illegal detentions and the abuses against the students.”

The Iguala disappearances occurred in the context of a “national human rights crisis with more than 26,500 people disappeared or missing in Mexico in the past years,” nearly half of them since Peña Nieto took office in late 2012, the right group said.

Separately Wednesday, Mexican polling firm Strategic Communications Cabinet published a survey that found that 79.2 percent of Mexicans believe the trainee teachers are dead and only 10.8 percent think – as do the students’ parents – that they are alive.

Seven of 10 Mexicans polled said the investigation into the case would be unaffected by the parents’ scheduled meeting Thursday with Peña Nieto, while 25.6 percent said the meeting would give a boost to the probe.

A forensics laboratory in Austria says two severely burned samples have been identified as belonging to two of the missing students, a result the Mexican government says confirms the official version that the trainee teachers’ bodies were burned at the dump.

But AI and the parents note that international forensic experts with the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team said last week that the tests by Austria’s Medical University of Innsbruck were inconclusive.

In the Strategic Communications Cabinet poll, 39.9 percent of respondents said they believed the remains studied by the Austrian lab corresponded to students Alexander Mora and Jhosivani Guerrero, while 32.2 percent said they believed they did not and 24.5 percent said they did not know. EFE