The international investigation into the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from a rural teachers’ college in Mexico announced they’re withdrawing from the case due to the government’s failure to give them access to vital information and will be leaving the country next week. 

In their sixth and final report, the independent panel — the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), a committee of jurists and doctors — said the Mexican army, navy, police and intelligence agencies "all collaborated to make them disappear."

“The failure to provide existing information for the investigation of atrocious events such as these, must be denounced by the Prosecutor’s Office and investigated to achieve justice,” the GIEI report read.

The five-member multinational panel said Tuesday at a press conference that they have not been able to definitively determine what happened to the 43 students who disappeared from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College. 

The investigators with the GIEI, a panel appointed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights nine years ago, said they’ve gathered enough evidence to suggest that security forces at the local, state and federal levels "all collaborated to make them disappear,” said panel member Carlos Beristain during the press conference.

The 43 missing students went missing in the city of Iguala, Guerrero, on Sept. 26, 2014. Only the remains of three students have been formally identified in the nearly 10-years since. 

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced Tuesday that his government was “going to continue the investigation.”

Suspects include many military commanders, troop personnel, police officers, as well as administrative and judicial authorities, who were accused of “organized crime, forced disappearance, torture, homicide and crimes against the administration of justice.”

The GIEI experts revealed different pressures and obstacles such as “lack of information,” “secrecy” and “hidden evidence” at various points throughout the investigation until it reached a “critical point in August 2022.” 

They also said that the GIEI was forced to leave the investigation in 2016 and invited back in 2020 by the new government of Mexico under President Obrador, who’d made a promise to investigate the disappearance.

“The concealment of that information has contributed not only to the concealing of government responsibilities, but it has constituted in itself a responsibility of the state in the disappearance of these young men,” GIEI member Carlos Beristain said on Tuesday.

He added that “access to information has been partial and another part of it continues to be hidden.”

Another panel member Angela Buitrago, said the experts were unable to access key intelligence files.

“That condition was to have all the information that was in the files that had not been opened, such as intelligence files,” she said.

“The reason why we are leaving is because we cannot go further without that information,” she told CNNE. “Really, we have delivered this report with what could be done, but we cannot move forward without that information… so that is the reason why we are leaving Mexico.”