Members of a local drug trafficking gang confessed to killing the 43 students from a teachers college who went missing in September after being attacked by police.

In addition to confessing to the mass murder, Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam announced that three gang members burned the victims on a pyre and pulverized their teeth and bones to prevent them from being identified.

Although officials have not confirmed that the human remains belong to the missing students, Karam stated that there are "many indications" that the victims were the students during a press conference on Friday, the Guardian reported.

"The high level of degradation caused by the fire in the remains make it very difficult to extract the DNA that will allow an identification," he said, according to NPR. "What I can tell you with certainty [is that] there was a homicide of many people. The statements of [the suspects], the work of the experts, what they found in each one of the tombs, the certainty of where the garbage bags were ... I have no doubt that there was a mass homicide."

The students, who attended a rural college for the poor, disappeared on Sept. 26 in the southern city of Iguala after the mayor, Jose Luis Abarca, allegedly ordered police to attack them in order to prevent them from coming to the city and disrupting a party and speech by his wife, according to the Los Angeles Times.

"He didn't say that they should be kidnapped and killed," the attorney said. "But the order makes it clear that they [the police] should act in that way." The students, who attended a radical teacher training college, were in the city to commandeer buses to use in a later protest.

Police opened fire, killing six of the students. The rest were allegedly handed over to members of the Guerreros Unidos drug gang, who reportedly have ties with Mayor Abarca. Authorities believe the police told the gang that the students were members of a rival trafficking group.

Both Abarca and his wife were arrested earlier this week in Mexico City.