The head of Mexico’s immigration department will face criminal charges in connection with the fire at a detention center that killed 40 people, authorities said Tuesday.

Francisco Garduño, leader of the country’s National Immigration Institute, was criminally responsible for the deadly fire at a migrant detention center in Juarez, prosecutors said.

The blaze erupted March 27 at a facility where dozens of Central American migrants were being held. Investigators said one of the men held at the facility started the inferno by lighting a mattress on fire to protest the brutal conditions.

Six people, including the Venezuelan man suspected of initiating the blaze, were arrested in the days after the tragedy.

But responsibility didn’t stop there, according to prosecutors. Garduño and other top immigration officials should have known about and addressed the subpar conditions in the facility, investigators said.

In 2020, a fire at a different immigration facility killed one person and left 14 others injured. That incident, combined with last month’s disaster, showed a “pattern of irresponsibility,” prosecutors said. In addition to Garduño, five more immigration officials will be charged.

Three lower-level officials and a guard were among those arrested and charged with homicide. Video from the detention center showed guards walking away from the fire and leaving the migrants locked in their group cell to burn.

Earlier Tuesday, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the guards in the video didn’t have the keys to unlock the cell.

“The door was closed, because the person who had the keys wasn’t there,” the president said.

Investigators are still working to identify everyone who died in the fire. Of the 40 people killed, 31 have been returned to their home countries, including at least 17 to Guatemala and six to Honduras.

With News Wire Services