Mexican police have arrested last Friday a member of a criminal drug gang linked with the murder of 43 student teachers in the southern city of Iguala last September.

The prosecutors claim that Felipe Rodriguez, a man that goes by the moniker “El Cepillo" or "The Brush” apparently ordered his Guerreros Unidos gang members to incinerate the bodies of the student protesters as well as burn all of the apparel of the victims in an apparent attempt to hide the evidence.

The murdered student teachers were detained by police after a planned protest was foiled and they were handed over to the Guerreros Unidos gang ostensibly in order to ensure that they would not interrupt a political rally where the mayor of Iguala Jose Luis Abarca’s wife Maria de los Angeles Pineda would have been speaking in order to gain political support.

The disappearance of the 43 students has sparked outrage around and outside of Mexico.

According to a BBC article Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam identified Rodriquez in November as the gang member who had ordered the bodies and clothes of the victims to be burned in a nearby rubbish dump and discarded into a local stream.

Mr Murillo Karam claims that: "His intent was to destroy all evidence of the murders."

So far nearly 90 men and women – the majority of them local police in south-western Guerrero State -- have been detained in connection with the case of the missing 43 students.

Members of the gang have confessed to killing of the 43 and burning their bodies after they were told, according to the BBC article, that the students were part of a rival gang .

As of date the remains of only one student, Alexander Mora, have been identified so far.