Mexico has arrested retired general José Rodríguez Pérez in connection with the bloody disappearance of 43 students in the city of Iguala nearly eight years ago.   

  Deputy Security Secretary Ricardo Mejía announced the news on Thursday, referring to Rodríguez only as “commander of the 27th Infantry Battalion when the events in Iguala occurred.”  He did not specify any charges against Rodriguez.  A spokesperson for the Secretariat of Government confirmed to CNN that Rodríguez Pérez retired with the rank of general.   

  CNN is working to contact Rodríguez’s defense.   

  Mejia said a total of four arrest warrants have been issued against unidentified members of the Mexican military.  Three of the four have been arrested, he said.   

  Mexico’s defense minister did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.   

  The missing students were intercepted by local police and federal military forces on September 26, 2014, while traveling to Mexico City from their teachers’ college near the town of Ayotzinapa.   

  They were meant to mark the anniversary of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, where government forces killed up to 300 student protesters in Mexico City.  But they never succeeded.   

  Bullet-riddled buses were later seen on the streets of Iguala, and some remaining students on the buses accused security forces of opening fire.  But forty-three of their peers were never found again.   

  On August 18, a truth commission set up by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador released a bombshell report concluding that the missing students were victims of “state-sponsored crime,” claiming that agents from various government agencies concurred with evidence organized crime to commit the murders.  According to the report, at least six of those victims were initially kidnapped and later murdered under Rodriguez’s supervision.   

  “It is alleged that six of the students remained alive for four days after the events and that they were killed and disappeared on the orders of possibly then-Colonel José Rodríguez Pérez,” Mexico’s top human rights official Alejandro Encinas told the press in August.  conference together with Lopez Obrador.   

  The report, Encinas added, claims that on September 30, 2014, Rodríguez said “they had already taken care of the six students who were left alive.”