Mexico : Mexican prosecutors and the federal police’s internal affairs are investigating allegations that officers gunned down 16 unarmed civilians in January, officials said on Monday.
Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong spoke a day after a media report concluded that federal police opened fire on people wielding nothing more than sticks on January 6 in Apatzingan, a city in the troubled western state of Michoacan.
The report by journalist Laura Castellanos, published Sunday by the magazine Proceso and the news website Aristegui Noticias, contradicts official accounts that nine people died in the crossfire of a shootout between police and former rural militiamen.
It is the latest allegation of abuse to hit Mexico’s security forces. “We hope that the attorney general’s office will draw its own conclusions and make them known,” Osorio Chong told reporters, adding that the federal police was cooperating and conducting an internal investigation.
“We are waiting for the results of the investigation and, with that, we will know what really happened that day in Apatzingan,” he said that after attending the signing of an accord on protecting human rights. The National Security Commission said over the weekend that it had given prosecutors a video it received anonymously that appears to show an excessive use of force or abuse of authority by federal police officers in Apatzingan.
