Mexican cartel members who 'flayed boy's face off and gouged his eyes out'

his eyes out' arrested in hunt for 43 missing students

43 Mexican students in 2014.

Renato Sales, the National Security Commissioner

of Mexico, announced the arrests on Friday. He suggested that the three suspects were members of the Guerreros Unidos crime syndicate, which is widely believed to have taken control of the students once they were abducted by corrupt police.

These latest arrests mean that 113 people have now been arrested, including 44 police officers, and yet the authorities have still not located the missing students.

of around a hundred students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College

were travelling in buses to demonstrate at a conference being held by María de los Ángeles Pineda Villa, the wife of Iguala mayor José Luis Abarca Velázquez.

They intended to protest corruption and discriminatory hiring and funding practices on behalf of the government, feeling that they were discriminated against in favour of students from urban areas.

vehicles following a shoot-out in which six people died.

One student,

Julio César Mondragón, was found dead the next morning with his eyes gouged out and the skin flayed from his face, leaving only a bare skull. Commissioner Sales stated that one of the men most recent arrested was being treated as the principal suspect in Mondragón’s death.

The other two suspects were involved in “receiv[ing] the young men from Iguala municipal police”, Commissioner Sales added.

been located. While the other 41 students are still unaccounted

for, it is widely assumed that they have also been killed by Guerreros Unidos. Mass graves found by investigators turned out to relate to other unsolved crimes.