Mexico City to tighten school safety after girl, 7, killed

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico City officials said Tuesday they will tighten rules for children leaving government schools on their own after a 7-year-old girl was found murdered over the weekend.

In Mexico City, even grade-school students often simply walk out of school after classes to meet parents waiting on the sidewalks, but there have been few controls to ensure someone is there to meet them.

That is apparently what happened to Fatima, who was seen on video leaving her school on Feb. 11 with an unidentified woman. Mexico City prosecutor Ernestina Godoy said the girl “recognized her, and so they let her go with her.”

Her body was found wrapped in a bag and abandoned in a rural area on Saturday. By law, prosecutors don't give the full name of victims.

Humberto Fernandez, the head of the city's school system, said there is already a little-used rule requiring parents or designated person to show up within 20 minutes after classes, or their kids will be taken to a prosecutors' office.

Fernandez said that rule was “very rarely”enforced because children were accepted at only one downtown prosecutors'office in the city of 9 million. Fernandez said all prosecutors'offices in the city's 16 boroughs will recieve children, and police patrol cars will be obliged to help school officials take them there.

Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said authorities would now issue amber alerts and start searching for children as soon as they are reported missing by a relative or teacher. Authorities lost a full day in the search for Fatima because they waited for a formal missing-person case file to be opened.

Family and neighbors packed a street in the southern borough of Tlahuac on Tuesday for a Mass underneath a massive yellow tarp strung from roof to roof.

The priest...