A high-ranking drug cartel member linked to last year's disappearance of 43 college students in Mexico's Guerrero state has been taken into custody, Mexican authorities said on Thursday.

Gildardo López Astudillo was captured on Wednesday in the city of Taxco, southwest of Mexico City, state prosecutor Miguel Ángel Godínez Muñoz and National Security Commissioner Renato Sales announced, according to the Associated Press. Sales described the 36-year-old López as the "intellectual author" of the students' disappearance.

"As a result of an investigation carried out over 11 months, it was confirmed that López Astudillo changed his residence on up to three occasions," Mexico's Federal Police noted in a statement. "[He] is subject to an arrest warrant [on charges of] organized crime and kidnapping. A number of individuals in custody have pointed to him as the presumed author of the disappearance of 43 students from the Isidro Burgos Normal School."

According to official accounts of the incident, López was instructed by his boss, drug lord Sidronio Casarrubias Salgado, to defend his gang against rivals in Iguala, the AP reported. When local police in the Guerrero town illegally detained the students from the rural school of Ayotzinapa on Sept. 26, 2014, cartel members killed them and incinerated their bodies at a garbage dump.

Nevertheless, a group of independent investigators has cast doubts on many aspects of the official inquiry, fueling the anger of families who still do not know what exactly happened to their children, the newswire noted. The parents of two of the students, Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz and Alexander Mora Venancio, meanwhile, challenged the official determination that the youngsters' bodies had been positively identified, Vanguardia reported.

The findings are based on an analysis by the University of Innsbruck's medical school, to which Arely Gómez, Mexico's attorney general, had turned for assistance in identifying the remains found at the garbage dump in the city of Cocula, the newspaper detailed.

"They always come out with their lies," Ezequiel Mora, Alexander's father, said about the attorney general's office. "They do not clear up things about an investigation in which Iguala's local police, the judiciary, state authorities [and] the Federal Police were involved; they all had something to do with it."