Mexican police find 24 bodies; drug gang suspected

SAN PEDRO ATLAPULCO, Mexico (Reuters) - Mexican police found 24 bodies dumped outside a small town near the capital on Friday in one of the most grisly discoveries yet in a rash of recent drug gang killings.

The victims, left on grassy wasteland close to the town of San Pedro Atlapulco in the State of Mexico, had their hands tied and had been shot in the head, local police told Reuters. The method of execution is common among Mexico's drug gangs.

State Attorney General Alberto Bazbaz said the dead, all men, had apparently been killed on Friday morning and were "without doubt" the victims of organized crime.

"We are working to take away the 24 bodies," Bazbaz told Mexican television, as police and troops roped off the pitch-dark area to media crews and the corpses were hauled away in ambulances.

Mexico has been blighted by a steady rise in brutal drug gang murders ever since President Felipe Calderon deployed the army to crush smuggling cartels in late 2006. A fresh spurt in violent killings has shaken the nation in recent weeks.

The latest victims were dumped a few paces from a road that runs through a rundown rural area about an hour's drive from Mexico City. Mexican media said they were blindfolded and their bodies showed torture marks.

Bazbaz said they were aged from around 20 to 35 and had military-style haircuts. He said police were investigating whether they were Mexican or possibly from Central America.

The Mexican daily Reforma cited the state secretary general, Humberto Benitez, as saying he believed the mass killing was related to a turf dispute between criminal gangs.

Mexico's powerful drug cartels control networks of organized crime and kidnapping gangs and have links to drug traffickers all the way down through Central America to Colombia, the main source of cocaine on U.S. streets.

Victims of cartel hitmen are often dumped in small groups, sometimes with warning notes attached, but Friday's mass discovery appeared to be the biggest since Calderon's drug war started.

August, the bloodiest month of the drug war, saw around 450 people killed, mostly rival gang members or police officers, including 11 people believed to have been decapitated by Gulf cartel hitmen who left their headless corpses piled up near the southern city of Merida.

More than 2,700 people have been killed across Mexico this year in drug gang-related violence, much of it concentrated along the northern border area, and abductions are also rife.

(Additional reporting by Catherine Bremer and Adriana Barrera in Mexico City; Writing by Catherine Bremer; Editing by Eric Walsh)