Ex-cop once suspected of homicide gunned down in southern Mexico

Armed assailants on Wednesday gunned down a former state police officer who was once a suspect in the deaths of two students from a rural teachers’ college, authorities in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero said.

Police reports indicate that the assailants attacked a food establishment owned by the ex-police officer, Rey David Cortes, in Chilpancingo, Guerrero’s capital.

Cortes died while being transported to the hospital, while two other women also were wounded in the attack.

Even though the attack took place across from the headquarters of the state Attorney General’s Office, the assailants managed to flee the scene.

Cortes and fellow police officer Ismael Matadama Salinas were arrested in 2012 in connection with the deaths of two trainee teachers - Jorge Alexis Herrera Pino and Gabriel Echeverria de Jesus.

Herrera Pino and Echeverria de Jesus were shot and killed on Dec. 12, 2011, during a police attempt to clear a roadblock on a highway that runs from the central city of Cuernavaca to the Pacific resort city of Acapulco.

They and other students at the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Guerrero state had blockaded the road to press their demands for increased funding and better conditions for their school and guaranteed future employment.

Cortes and Matadama were released from custody in 2013 due to lack of evidence.

In September 2014, 43 students from that same rural, all-male teachers’ college, known for its leftist activism, were abducted in Guerrero.

Presumed dead, those trainee teachers have never been found and the official account of their disappearance has been roundly rejected by their families, as well as by independent experts and investigators who reviewed the case.