Three men have been arrested due to their ties to the 2014 disappearance of 43 Mexican students who went missing in the state of Guerrero.

As the Associated Press reports, Renato Sales, Mexico's security commissioner, announced that the suspects have links to an organized gang that authorities say took the the students from Iguala authorities.

A year ago, Mexican attorney general Jesus Murillo Karam announced that all 43 of the students were dead, citing confessions as well as forensic evidence.

According to the official story, on Sept. 26, 2014, about a hundred protesting students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College were arrested by police and then handed over to members of the Guerreros Unidos cartel who then killed them and incinerated their bodied at a nearby dump.

Before this occurred, six people were killed in a shoot-out. One of the six victims, a student named Julio César Mondragon, was found the next morning with his eyes gouged out and the skin peeled from his face.

Announcing the arrest of the three suspects on Jan. 22, Sales said that one of the arrested men was the prime suspect in Mondragon's death.

So far authorities have arrested 113 people in the case, a number which includes the ex-mayor of Iguala, as well as 44 police officers.

The Independent reports that Sales suggested that the three suspects were members of the Guerreros Unidos crime syndicate.

As previously reported, Mexico’s murder rate has increased dramatically in 2015, rising to almost 9 percent.

Government data informs that around 17,013 murders were reported last year. The year before there were 15,653 reported homicides.

In 2014, as a reaction to the missing 43 students, Peña Nieto proposed to dissolve the nation's 1,800 local police forces and unify all officers into 32 state forces. In theory, unifying the authorities would make it more difficult for drug gangs to infiltrate or influence the officers.

Related