The former mayor of a Mexican city has been charged with the kidnapping of 43 trainee teachers - in the same week that protesters stormed a military base.
Prosecutors have obtained an arrest warrant for Jose Luis Abarca and 44 others following the alleged abductions in the southwestern city of Iguala in September.
It comes after hundreds of students attacked an army compound hurling burning trucks in protest at the kidnapping of the students, who are all feared dead.
Activists broke into the military zone of the 27th battalion in an attempt to look for the students' bodies, and were met my lines of police throwing tear gas. Four people were injured.
The attack came after it was announced that Maria de los Angeles Pineda, the wife of the former mayor who allegedly masterminded a plot to kidnap and execute the 43 students in September, will be tried for engaging in organised crime.
Pineda - known as the First Lady of murder - and her husband Jose Luis Abarca are accused of ordering the disappearance of the trainee teachers.
It is believed that Pineda, in her role as boss of the local Guerreros Unidos cartel, ordered corrupt police to kidnap the victims overnight on September 26, before handing them over to mobsters.
They were then killed, stacked 'like a grill', incinerated, and had their remains dumped in a river, according to the testimonies of gang members who have already been questioned.
The students had planned to disrupt a celebration Pineda was organising and she allegedly had them killed 'to teach them a lesson'.
Since the protesters disappeared, the remains of only one person have been identified.
The alleged crimes led to months of unrest and yesterday students from the same training course joined other protesters to attack an army base.
Trucks attempting to drive along a road outside the compound were stopped and set alight and activists grabbed beer bottles from one truck to hurl at military police.
Officers in turn used tear gas in an attempt to disperse the protesters. Four people were hurt by the hail of bricks, stones and glass, according to local reports.
At one point footage from the scene appears to show two Corona trucks being pulled across the road to stop protesters advancing on the base.
The courts authority believes Pineda has been working with Guerreros Unidos - meaning Warriors United - since at least 2005.
Between 2009 and 2014, she took deposits likely originating with the drug gang worth about 13.7 million pesos ($936,016) in four bank accounts, the court said.
Gang members who have already been questioned have referred to Pienda as the 'Jefa de los Jefes' - the boss of bosses.
One of five children, all of Maria's immediate family is now either dead or behind bars because of organised crime.
She is the second daughter of Salomon Pineda and Maria Villa, who together came to forge a brutal and widely feared crime syndicate operating in the Guerrero and Morelos states south of Mexico City.
Their rise to power came when Pineda was still a young girl and she witnessed the kidnapping, ransoming and eventual murder of her elder sister, Guadalupe, by the Familia Michoacana cartel.
Determined to seek revenge, the family partnered with a rival cartel, cementing their hold and widening their reach.
'The Pineda-Villa family would always leave their victims' bodies by the dock on the town's lagoon', said fisherman Valdemar Servin, of Guerrero, where the family had their headquarters.
'They paid off the local authorities and made sure people who spoke out against them disappeared. Maria was well known around town and she loved the fact that people were scared of her'.
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