Mexico City, November 8 (EFE-RHC)-- The 43 teacher trainees missing since a September 26th incident in the southern state of Guerrero involving gangsters and corrupt police are dead, Mexican Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam announced Friday, citing statements from three suspects in custody.

Patricio Reyes, Jhonatan Osorio and Agustin Garcia confessed to having killed the students and burned their bodies, the attorney general told a press conference.

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

Six people died that night, 25 were wounded and 43 Ayotzinapa students were detained and then handed over to members of the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel.

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

"I have no doubt there was a massive homicide there," Murillo said Friday as he presented a reconstruction of the crime that included a video filmed at the dump in Cocula, a town near Iguala, where the killers disposed of the students' bodies. The attorney general said: "They burned them, clothes and all.”

The Mexican official said that for the purposes of the investigation, the students will continue to be classified as missing until the remains are definitively identified by specialists at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.

After watching the bonfire burn for more than 14 hours, the killers collected the ashes and bones in eight garbage bags and then tossed the bags into a nearby river, the attorney general said.

Authorities managed to recover one of the bags intact and its contents will be analyzed to confirm the suspects' account, he said.