Mexico Offers Rewards for Arrests in 43 Missing Case

Mexican authorities offered Tuesday a total of $500,000 in rewards for the arrest of a fugitive former police chief and four other suspects sought over last year's disappearance of 43 students.

A bounty of $145,000 was set for information leading to the arrest of Felipe Flores Velazquez, the former police chief of the city of Iguala, where the students vanished on September 26, 2014.

A reward of nearly $90,000 was offered by the attorney general's office for each of the four other suspects, whose jobs or roles in the case were not specified.

Flores Velazquez fled shortly after his police forces attacked several buses that had been hijacked by the students in Iguala.

Prosecutors say the officers shot at the buses, killing six people, and delivered 43 students to the Guerreros Unidos drug gang, which killed the young men and incinerated their bodies.

Flores Velazquez is the cousin of Iguala's former mayor Jose Luis Abarca, who was arrested last year on charges of ordering the attack on the students.

More than 100 people, including officers and gang suspects, have been arrested in the case, which has been the biggest challenge of President Enrique Pena Nieto's administration.

Independent investigators have questioned the government's conclusions in the case, saying there was no evidence they were incinerated at a garbage dump.