Suspected drug hit men dump head in Mexican city

MONTERREY, Mexico (Reuters) - Suspected Mexican drug hit men dumped the head of a murdered man on top of a car in the street, police said on Friday, in a rare outrage in the wealthy city of Monterrey.

The head, found on Thursday night on the roof of a car parked in a middle-class residential area, had a written message next to it signed by the Gulf cartel, the country's most violent drug organization.

The ears were chopped off, a senior state police officer told reporters on condition of anonymity.

Mexican drug gangs, engaged in a bitter fight with each other and security forces, behead opponents to scare rivals, but this was the first such decapitation in Monterrey, home to large corporations and a wealthy business elite.

The message, written on cardboard or paper, suggested the victim may have been a common criminal who had passed himself off as a member of the Gulf cartel's feared Zetas hit squad.

"This is what happens to people who want to pass for Zetas," the message read, according to El Norte newspaper. The man's body has not been found, police sources said.

In Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico, gunmen dressed as federal investigative agents forced their way into a city prison and freed six inmates on Friday, the state attorney general's office said.

The inmates were arrested in March, accused of working for the Zetas, Mexican media said.

Also on Friday in Ciudad Juarez across the border from El Paso, Texas, drug hit men killed two rivals in a hospital near the city's main military base, police and doctors said.