9 bodies found hanging off Mexican bridge

The bodies of four women and five men were found hanging off a bridge in the Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo with an apparent message from a drug gang, an army official said Friday. The bodies showed signs of beating and torture and "we believe they were members of a criminal gang," the official said, declining to be named. Photographs showed the bodies strung, with their hands tied, along a wide road bridge in the border city in northeast Mexico, across from Laredo, Texas, in a typical sign of score-settling between drug gangs. A large banner hung nearby with a message alluding to gang disputes. There were scenes of panic as road users first saw the bodies, which police reports said had been strung up early Friday. Nuevo Laredo, the main road trade crossing from Mexico into the United States, is regularly the scene of vicious disputes between the Zetas drug gang -- set up by ex-army officers-turned-hitmen in the 1990s -- and their former employers the Gulf cartel, now believed to be allied to the Sinaloa cartel of billionaire fugitive Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman. Mexico has seen a rise in violence blamed for more than 50,000 deaths since the start of a nationwide military crackdown on organized crime in December 2006.