Thread by @reveal

🧵: Omar Gómez Trejo, special prosecutor in the #Ayotzinapa case investigating the 2014 kidnapping of 43 Mexican students, announced his resignation on Tuesday.

Gómez Trejo was a key source in our #AfterAyotzinapa series. revealnews.org/article/after-…

His resignation comes after significant developments in the case, including the arrest of a former attorney general. We’ve learned this was a point of contention and that Gómez Trejo’s investigators thought it was premature.

Documents also reveal that Gómez Trejo’s office had issued more than 80 arrest warrants for other suspects, but the government canceled them – with no explanation.

In his daily news conference on Tuesday, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Gómez Trejo “didn’t agree with the procedures that were followed to approve the arrest orders” and alluded to “differences.”

The families of the Ayotzinapa students “expressed confidence in Gómez Trejo and his team’s work and called the developments ‘extremely concerning’ for the pursuit of justice in the case,” @AP writes.

Monday marked 8 years since the students went missing. apnews.com/article/latin-…

If you listened to #AfterAyotzinapa, you’ll remember that Gómez Trejo was involved with the case in its earliest days in 2014, serving as an observer for the United Nations which was following the government’s investigation. revealnews.org/podcast/after-…

In its original investigation, the Mexican government claimed the students were taken by corrupt local police and passed off to a criminal gang, who took them to a garbage dump, shot them, then threw their bodies down a steep hill of garbage and burned them for 16 hours.

In their findings reports about the Mexican government’s original investigation, Gómez Trejo and a team of international experts implicated the Mexican government in lying, planting evidence and forcing confessions in the case. revealnews.org/podcast/after-…

After presenting their findings publicly in 2016, Gómez Trejo was worried he’d be indicted or worse, so he left the country. But he remained dedicated to the case.

At the same time, the government was doing all it could to discredit him and the forensic team’s findings.

In 2018, a shift happened in Mexico when President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was elected.

He reopened the Ayotzinapa case in early 2019 and Gómez Trejo applied for the special prosecutor job – and got it.

It was a head spinning turn.

After fleeing Mexico and spending almost three years in exile for pushing back on the Mexican government’s original investigation, Gómez Trejo would now be in charge of a new investigation.

In the years Gómez Trejo was in charge of the case, he found evidence that Tomás Zerón, the head of the original investigation, was involved in falsifying evidence and forcing confessions.

Zerón fled to Israel, which has refused to extradite him. nytimes.com/2021/07/15/wor…

A source led Gómez Trejo and his team to a ravine where human bone fragments were found. A lab matched them to Ayotzinapa student Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre.

It was only the second time remains had been identified and matched with a student. apnews.com/article/austri…

He got access to a @DEAHQ case file which had intercepted texts between drug smugglers in a Guerreros Unidos cell outside of Chicago.

The gang’s Mexico cell had been blamed for killing the students in the government’s original story.

Guerreros Unidos founder Adán Casarrubias Salgado was mentioned frequently in the texts. He was extradited to the U.S. in May on charges of conspiracy, drug trafficking and money laundering.

If tried in a U.S. court, more info could come out about what happened to the students.

We cover all this and more in this week’s #Ayotzinapa update episode on Reveal. ⬇️ Tune in.

We’ll also be following this story into the future. revealnews.org/podcast/after-…