The former mayor of the Mexican city of Cocula has been charged with ties to organized crime.

César Miguel Penaloza Santana was arrested on Dec. 16 on suspicion of having links with a criminal group that operates in northern Guerrero state, BBC News reports.

The city of Cocula made the news last year when officers from the municipality were linked to the disappearance of 43 students who went missing in Iguala.

According to the Mexican government, officers from the Cocula force as well as Iguala abducted 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College and then handed them over to a local drug gang who proceeded to kill them and incinerate their remains.

Officials did not offer any further details regarding Penaloza Santana, but local media reported that a suspect involved in the mass disappearance linked the former mayor to the Guerreros Unidos drug gang.

Milenio reports in 2014 Penaloza Santana denied that the Guerreros Unidos gang had ever even been active in Cocula.

The official story of the events regarding the missing 43 is currently being investigated anew.

As previously reported, a team of investigators who are unaffiliated with the Mexican government have released new evidence that contradicts the official story of how the 43 students disappeared. 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 prove that there are no signs of a fire at the dump where the bodies were allegedly incinerated.

Penaloza Santana is not the first Mexican mayor to be tied to the missing 43. Earlier this year, federal investigators charged Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, with ordering local police to hand the students over to members of the Guerreros Unidos gang.