Missing Mexican students dead: Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam

Mexico: Forty-three teacher-trainee students missing since September in Mexico's Guerrero state are dead, an official said citing recent statements from three detained suspects.

Mexican Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam on Friday said that Patricio on Reyes, Jhonatan Osorio and Agustin Garcia confessed to having killed the students and burnt their bodies.

Students hold a banner with the faces of the missing that reads in Spanish ‘Iguala, cradle of murders'. Pic/AP

More than 70 people, including police and public officials, have been arrested in connection with the events that took place on the night of September 26 in Iguala, Guerrero, when the municipal police fired gunshots at the students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School, a teacher training facility.

Six people were killed that night, 25 were injured and 43 students were abducted and handed over to members of the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel.

The cops were allegedly acting on orders from Iguala's former mayor Jose Luis Abarca, and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, who were tracked down Monday after being on the run for weeks.

"I have no doubt there was a massive homicide there. They burned them," Murillo said.

Some of the students were dead or unconscious before being set ablaze, apparently suggesting that the others were burnt alive.

For the purposes of investigation, the students will continue to be classified as missing until the remains are definitively identified by specialists from the University of Innsbruck in Austria, said Murillo.