GUATEMALA CITY — Nearly a year after 43 Mexican teachers college students disappeared, an examination of the case by outside experts has rejected the government’s official narrative of events and claims that investigators tortured witnesses and mishandled evidence.

The report, more than 400 pages long, does not shed any light on the ultimate fate of the students, but it calls into question nearly all the claims by Mexican authorities about how the crime unfolded in the troubled hills of Guerrero state, particularly the assertion that the students were burned to death at the base of a rural trash dump.

Drawings of some of the 43 missing students are surrounded by flower petals, forming the shape of a heart, during a protest marking the six-month anniversary of their disappearance, in Mexico City in March.

The review, conducted over six months with the Mexican government’s cooperation by a group of experts convened by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, also proposed a possible new motive: that the students may have inadvertently stolen a bus full of drugs and that corrupt police wanted it back.

“This report provides an utterly damning indictment of Mexico’s handling of the worst human rights atrocity in recent memory,” José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “Even with the world watching and with substantial resources at hand, the authorities proved unable or unwilling to conduct a serious investigation.”

The Ayotzinapa students’ case marked a turning point for the presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto, generating months of street demonstrations and establishing that the drug-war atrocities his government hoped to leave in the past remained alive and well. Throughout all the upheaval, the parents of the students rejected the government’s version of events.

Mexican attorney general Arley Gomez Gonzalez told reporters on Sunday that the government remains committed to getting to the bottom of the Ayotzinapa case and the investigation will incorporate the report’s findings. She highlighted the areas of convergence between the government’s recommendation and the outside report, such as the conclusion that “the municipal police of Iguala and Cocula participated in the commission of these crimes.”

“The government of the republic reiterates its commitment to Mexican society, and particularly to the victims’ families, to continue working to clear up the facts,” she said.

Gomez added that the mandate of the experts’ group will be extended for them to complete their work.

Since then-Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam stood before reporters in November with videos of witness testimony, the official story has been that the teachers college students from Ayotzinapa were captured by police in the town of Iguala and handed over to drug cartel assassins, who shot them and burned their bodies in a remote trash dump. More than 100 people have been arrested.

But first Argentine forensic investigators working on behalf of victims’ families and now this team of investigators, have discounted key aspects of that theory. The latter conducted their work with the blessing of the Mexican government. They interviewed prisoners, witnesses and government officials, and they brought in experts to analyze crime scenes, including a fire expert to study the dump

All the people arrested in the case, Cox said, “deny any involvement” and “said that they were tortured.”

There were other seeming lapses during the course of the investigation: Clothes of the victims found by authorities had not been examined; surveillance videos were erased.

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