Mexico City, Jun 27 (EFE).- Nine months after 43 trainee teachers went missing in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, their parents said here they will continue their struggle to find them and that the truth of their whereabouts will soon come to light.

“We’re telling this murderous and corrupt government that no matter what they do they won’t succeed in dividing the parents, who are stronger than ever because we know the truth is near and that punishment is coming for the killers,” the spokesman for the family members, Felipe de la Cruz, said at a rally Friday in this capital.

Taking cover amid a pounding rain outside the entrance of the Palace of Fine Arts, one group of parents of the missing students insisted that they are alive and called on the government to hand them over safely.

“We’re demanding that they deliver the boys to us now because we really want these kids to get back to school. We’re saying today that everything this government is doing is crashing down on them and we’re sure the army has them,” one unidentified parent said.

The parents and their supporters reject Mexican authorities’ official account of the events of Sept. 26, 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero.

That night, police attacked students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School near Iguala as they traveled through the town on buses they had seized as part of a protest against a 2013 education overhaul.

Six people – including three students – were killed and 43 other students abducted.

Federal authorities say the incident was the work of corrupt municipal cops acting on the orders of a corrupt mayor who had connections with the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel.

The cops handed over the students to Guerreros Unidos gunmen, who killed the young people after being told they were members of a rival gang and burned their bodies at a dump, according to the official story.

The students’ families reject that version of events and are demanding to know why soldiers of the Mexican army’s Iguala-based 27th Infantry Battalion who witnessed the police attack did not intervene.

In December, respected newsweekly Proceso published a story drawing on a confidential Guerrero state government document that pointed to Mexico’s Federal Police – with the complicity or open collaboration of the army – as the perpetrators of the slaughter of the 43 students.

A respected team of forensic anthropologists from Argentina who were brought in by the students’ families to take part in the probe have also questioned the findings of the official investigation.

“Since (Sept. 26, 2014), we haven’t stopped looking for our children, and we’re going to keep looking for them until we find them. We know they’re alive,” one of the mothers said during Friday’s protest. EFE