Jose Luis Abarca, the fugitive mayor of the Guerrero city of Iguala who is accused of ordering an attack on 43 students missing and presumed dead, was captured early Tuesday along with his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, a Mexican official said.

Federal police spokesman Jose Ramon Salinas said via Twitter that the two were captured in Mexico City, in the densely populated working-class district of Iztapalapa. Television images showed police vehicles, red lights blazing, arriving at installations of the attorney general’s office in the predawn darkness, presumably with Abarca and Pineda aboard. There, they will be interrogated.

Abarca took a leave of absence from the mayor’s office after the students — last seen being led away by local police — went missing on Sept. 26 and just ahead of the discovery by federal authorities of about a dozen hidden mass graves on the outskirts of Iguala. He and his wife, who has close ties to known drug traffickers, quickly vanished and have been sought by federal authorities ever since.

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