A Mexican community activist who led search parties after the disappearance of 43 students of a teacher training institute in the town of Iguala last year, has been killed, a media report said on Monday.
Miguel Angel Jimenez Blanco was found dead inside a taxi he owned on Saturday, with two gunshot wounds in a town in the south-western state of Guerrero, CNN reported.
According to reports, the 43 students from Ayotzinapa teachers college were abducted on September 26, 2014, by municipal police in Iguala, and were handed over to members of the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel, who murdered the youths, burned the bodies at a dump in the nearby town of Cocula and threw the bones into the San Juan River.
However, nothing has been verified till date to authenticate the reports.
Jimenez was a part of an organisation which supported the search for the students in the hills around Iguala. He had also helped dig up a number of graves of murdered people that were found during the search for the students.
Last week, Jimenez told CNN Mexico that over 100 bodies were found in hidden graves in the area since October last year.
He said he'd recently started driving a taxi to make ends meet. After years of working to clean up the streets, he said he was once again worried about safety.
"We left it clean and now again there are bad people here, but we have to do something, because I cannot leave this to my children," he said.
In the town of Xaltianguis, Jimenez led a group of more than 100 women who took up weapons and began patrolling the streets.
Parents of the missing students have continued protests for months.
"Even though politicians and authorities ask us to accept that our 43 students were killed," a parent said, adding "we will keep looking for them alive as long as what happened is not explained with irrefutable scientific proof."
