MEXICO CITY – A Mexican judge has acquitted three military personnel of the extrajudicial killing of 15 suspected gang members during a confrontation in June 2014, the attorney general’s office said late on Friday.
The clash took place in Tlatlaya on the southern fringes of the State of Mexico, which borders the violence-plagued states of Guerrero and Michoacan.
Authorities said at the time that the dead were suspected drug gang members and that the military had acted in self-defence. A total of 22 people died in the incident.
But months later, foreign media reported that there was evidence of extrajudicial executions, a version later upheld by Mexico’s CNDH national human rights body.
Mexico’s military has been accused on multiple occasions of extrajudicial killings and torture during a decade-long war against the country’s brutal drug cartels. (Reuters)
