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Missing students activist killed in Mexico

August 10, 2015

The head of a village community group has been found shot to death in his taxi near the Mexican resort of Acapulco. Miguel Angel Jimenez had led efforts to find 43 students who disappeared last year.

https://p.dw.com/p/1GCVE
Demonstration anlässlich der Ermordung der 43 Studenten in Acapulco
A scene at a demonstration over the 43 students killed in 2014Image: AFP/Getty Images/Jorge Dan Lopez

Local police in Mexico said that they found Miguel Angel Jimenez in the taxi he owned and drove in the rural outskirts of Acapulco.

Police said on Sunday that Jimenez had been found dead in the driver's seat of his taxi "parked on the side of the road between Acapulco and Mexico, above the village of Xaltianguis" on Saturday night.

The taxi was near his home in the state of Guerrero, a major opium-producing state and the site of disputes between a number of criminal gangs.

At least 15 people were killed in the area over the weekend, according to Reuters.

In 2013 Jimenez had set up a self-defense group to deal with attacks from drug cartels.

As part of a regional group, he also led investigations to find 43 students who went missing last September in the town of Iguala, nearby in Guerrero state.

Jimenez had worked with families of the disappeared to find information and evidence, which he had then passed on to the authorities. "This area, we have always said it, it's a cemetery," he said in an interview last December.

Since the group began their investigations in November, 129 bodies have been found and handed over to the authorities for identification.

The 43 students are believed to have been arrested by local police on the instructions of the local mayor and his wife. They were handed over to a criminal gang and killed.

jm/gsw (AFP, Reuters, EFE)