A former top Mexican official has taken refuge in Israel, where he has been living for two years, The New York Times reported on Thursday.
The official, Tomás Zerón de Lucio, is the former chief of Mexico's Criminal Investigation Agency, and he is reportedly accused of abduction, torture and the tampering of evidence in the investigation into the 2014 disappearance of 43 students.
Zerón has denied these allegations and has applied for asylum in Israel, while Mexico has requested that he be extradited, according to the report.
Israel has not yet acted on either request and is stuck in a diplomatic tussle with Mexico, who supported the inquiries of the United Nations into allegations of Israeli war crimes against Palestinians.
An anonymous senior Israeli official said this is being used as "tit-for-tat diplomacy" against Mexico.
"Why would we help Mexico?" he asked to the Times.
As one of Mexico's top law enforcement officers, Zerón led the 2014 investigation into the abduction of 43 students in the pacific Mexican state of Guerrero on September 26. Municipal police officers in Iguala forced the students off their bus and took them away in police cars. The students were not seen again.
The abduction shocked the country, and then-president Enrique Peña Nieto pressured Zerón to solve it quickly.
The conclusion of Zerón's investigation was that the officers were working with a criminal group who killed the students and disposed of their ashes in a river.
However, a panel of international investigators discovered that Zerón used torture to obtain key testimony and mishandled evidence and crucial leads. In particular, he ignored the presence of the military and federal officers at the kidnapping, and instead treated the case as a local issue.
When currently President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office in 2018, he reopened the case, and fragments of the remains of two of the students were found. Following this discovery, a number of government officials were arrested, including Zerón.
Zerón reportedly escaped to Canada and from there to Israel. When his tourist visa expired, he applied for asylum, and his application is still under consideration.