By Brendan O’Boyle
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico’s president said on Tuesday that he had asked Israel for a second time to extradite a former official accused of torture in the Latin American country.
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said he sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu requesting help extraditing Tomas Zeron, head of Mexico’s criminal investigation agency between 2014-2016 under the previous administration.
Zeron led the heavily criticized investigation into the disappearance of 43 student teachers in southwestern Mexico in 2014 under a government to which Lopez Obrador was opposed.
The current Mexican government accuses Zeron of torturing witnesses and tampering with evidence and says he went to Israel to evade a probe into his handling of the investigation.
“It can’t be that Israel protects a torturer under any circumstance,” Lopez Obrador said in a regular press conference.
Zeron has previously denied allegations of wrongdoing.
Lopez Obrador, who made a similar extradition request in September 2021, said he expected Mexico’s Jewish community to support the effort to extradite Zeron.
Mexico’s top human rights official last year said the government’s involvement in the 2014 disappearances across federal, state and local levels was a “state crime.”
Israel’s embassy in Mexico declined to comment on Lopez Obrador’s remarks.
(Reporting by Brendan O’Boyle in Mexico City; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
