A team of investigators who are unaffiliated with the Mexican government have released new evidence that contradicts the official story of how 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College disappeared last year in Guerrero, Mexico.

The official government version of the events indicates that police abducted students in Iguala on Sept. 26, 2014. The officers then handed the students over to a local drug gang, the Guerreros Unidos, who murdered them, incinerated them, and tossed their charred remains into a local river.

As the BBC reports, an expert panel from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights held a news conference in which they argued that, due to new surveillance imagery, the approaches to solving the case should be re-examined.

According to the panel, satellite pictures show that there are no signs of a fire at the dump where the bodies were allegedly incinerated. Aside from this, the images indicate that there was rain at a point when there was supposed to have been a fire.

The expert panel asserted that there were more discrepancies in the official version of events.

According to the Mexican government, gang members built and maintained a pyre for up to 16 hours. Given what the panel has discovered about the area, feeding a pyre for that long would have been impossible.

The panel also said that the arrested gang members revealed they had been tortured into giving their confessions.

Families of the missing students have disbelieved the official story from the start.

Several months ago, at press conference in which family members of the missing 43 voiced their grief, a woman spoke of the frustration she and others had felt regarding the government's official story.

As reported in the New Yorker, the woman said, “We, the mothers and fathers, were right, we were right all along, we knew our sons hadn’t been burned, that it was a government lie.”

"We’re poor," the grieving mother added, "but we’re not stupid."