14 of 57 missing Mexican students found alive

IGUALA DE LA INDEPENDENCIA: Fourteen of 57 students who vanished after deadly shootings in southern Mexico have turned up alive but relatives feared for those still missing as authorities search for them.

A dozen troops manned a checkpoint Tuesday between Guerrero´s state capital, Chilpancingo, and the town of Iguala, stopping cars and checking IDs against a list of the missing students from a teacher training college.

The students disappeared following a bout of violence in Iguala late Friday and Saturday that left six people dead and 25 wounded in different parts of the municipality.

In one of the incidents, municipal police opened fire on three buses seized by the radical students, who are known to hijack buses and had taken them to go home after a fundraising drive in Iguala.

Three students were killed. A survivor told on Tuesday that he saw officers take away 30 to 40 students in several police cruisers and they have yet to be found.

Prosecutors said they were able to connect 22 officers who were detained to the six killings after ballistics tests linked their weapons to the shootings.

The officers are being investigated over the disappearances, said state prosecutor Inaky Blanco. Authorities are investigating whether organized crime was involved.

Guerrero is one of Mexico´s poorest state, beset by violence by a slew of drug gangs and social unrest.

"Unfortunately most of Iguala´s municipal police officers have links with organized crime," said Governor Angel Aguirre following reports that unidentified masked gunmen were involved in some of the shootings.

He said street surveillance cameras captured officers taking away an unspecified number of students.

Francisco Ochoa, 18, told he was among 14 students in a fourth bus that was stopped by the police.

The students came out and fled after the officers began to shoot in the air, he said. After hiding on the hills and other parts of town, the 14 students found other comrades in a marketplace.

"More patrol cars arrived from the right and the left, 12 to 13 of them," he said.

"I saw with my own eyes how they took away my comrades. I saw how they put 30-40 of them in patrol cars," he said at a wake for a fallen comrade attended by hundreds of people at the Raul Isidro teacher training school in Tixtla.