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A Mexican judge yesterday refused a special prosecutor's request for an arrest warrant against former President Luis Echeverria and several other former top officials in connection with a 1971 massacre, a significant setback in a case widely viewed as a test of whether Mexico will come to terms with abuses committed by the country's former authoritarian leaders. Officials in the prosecutor's office said the judge ruled that Mexico's 30-year statute of limitations for genocide had expired in the 1971 killings for which Echeverria had been accused. The prosecutor is seeking to charge the 82-year-old former president, who was in office from 1970 to 1976, with the killings of about 30 student protesters by government-backed security forces in Mexico City in June 1971. [more]