Drug gang victims hung from bridge

A SCREAMING teenager with a gunshot wound has been found dangling from a rope over a busy highway in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey.

Police said another man alongside him was dead by the time rescuers arrived and a third was found dead below.

Witnesses told police gunmen descended from a vehicle and hanged the men off a bridge, stopping traffic along one of the busiest routes in Mexico’s third-largest city, which has been plagued by drug-gang violence.

All three men had been shot and tortured, and their hands were bound with tape, said a Nuevo Leon state police investigator.

The dead man, aged in his early 20s, had within his bound hands a mobile phone, a sign he was considered an informant.

Police said none of the victims had been identified.

Two other men, one with a foot cut off, were hanged by their necks from a pedestrian bridge in Monterrey.

The city has seen a spike of violence since the Gulf and Zeta cartels began fighting for control of drug traffic there two years ago.

In a state where the drug cartel La Familia is based, police discovered 21 bodies piled up at six different sites in the outskirts of Morelia, the capital of Michoacan.

Officials this week found 21 bodies and were still looking at a seventh report of five more bodies. Montejano said all the murders were connected.

More than 35,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence across Mexico since President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against drug cartels when he took office in December 2006.