Mexico exhumes body of student killed in Guerrero

Mexican and Argentine experts on Wednesday began exhuming the body of a student who was found dead with his face skinned off the morning after 43 of his colleagues disappeared at the hands of police and a drug gang.

Julio César Mondragón's remains will undergo new testing after an independent commission formed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights determined that a first autopsy was marred by inconsistencies and contradictions. Mondragón's family has also demanded new tests.

Mondragón was one of six people killed in September 2014 in Iguala, in the southern state of Guerrero, when students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa came under attack while commandeering buses for a protest. The cases of the three students and three bystanders slain have been mostly forgotten in the furor over the 43 missing students, whose fate is still unknown more than a year later.

The same group of experts has previously dismantled the government's official version that the students were killed and incinerated in a giant pyre at a trash dump, saying the fire described in the attorney general's investigation could not have occurred.

Mondragón, 22, was married with a 2-month-old child when he was killed.

His original autopsy, conducted by the state prosecutor, said the skin on his face could have been peeled off by a knife, a terror tactic known to be used by drug cartels on their victims. But the same report also said an animal may have been responsible for the disfiguring, a possibility that his family calls a "mockery."

The independent experts of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights concluded that Mondragón's body showed "visible signs of torture," but the state investigation made no mention of that.

Mondragón's family has accused local, state and federal authorities of hindering the investigation and asked for experts from the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team to be present at the exhumation. The Argentines have also analyzed evidence in the case of the missing 43.

Cuitláhuac Mondragón, the slain man's uncle, acknowledged that the decision to exhume the corpse was difficult because it causes the family to relive the nightmare, but said it was necessary.

"All we ask for is the truth," he said.