Drug gang pins up police hit list in northern Mexico

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico, May 26 (Reuters) - A drug gang has pinned up hit lists across a northern Mexican city that names police officers it wants to murder, law authorities said on Monday.

Police said they found three banners with the names of 21 state police officers hung on road bridges on Sunday in Chihuahua city, the capital of Chihuahua state near Texas.

The banners displayed the names of the police in black ink and were signed by the Gente Nueva (New People) gang, a break-away group from the powerful Gulf cartel from eastern Mexico, a police spokesman said.

Gente Nueva is a shadowy group that appeared in 2007 and which aims to counter the Gulf cartel's power in Mexico with funding from rival gangs from the Pacific state of Sinaloa, U.S. and Mexican anti-drug authorities say.

In January, drug gangs pinned a hit list to a police monument in Chihuahua's second-largest city, Ciudad Juarez, over the border from El Paso, Texas. They have so far killed half the 17 police on the list, despite a deployment of 3,000 troops and 500 federal police across Chihuahua state.

President Felipe Calderon has sent 25,000 troops and federal police to quell the drug war across Mexico since taking office in December 2006, making big narcotics seizures and arresting drug kingpins.

But violence is still rising as drug gangs fight each other and target troops and police officers.

Gangland killings have surged in Mexico in recent weeks and some 1,400 people have been killed in drug violence this year, up 50 percent from this time in 2007.

Drug violence killed more than 2,500 people in 2007 as rival gangs fight over smuggling routes to the United States. (Reporting by Ignacio Alvarado, editing by Philip Barbara)