Twenty-three people were murdered on Saturday in the Mexican beach resort of Acapulco, including 15 decapitated men found near a shopping centre, authorities said yesterday, in the latest onslaught of Mexico’s brutal drug wars.

Police responding to a report of a fire shortly after midnight instead found five abandoned vehicles and the bodies of 15 men who had been beheaded, they said. Messages whose contents were not disclosed were left with the bodies.

“On the sidewalk of the Plaza Senderos shopping centre were the decapitated bodies of 15 males, between 25 and 30 years of age,” a police report said.

“The heads were found in one single place, with the exception of one that was half severed from the body and with an impact of a projectile from a firearm.”

Another six murder victims were found inside a taxi near a supermarket, and two other men were murdered in other parts of the city, police said in a statement.

Inside the taxi, “the bodies of six men were found – one in the passenger seat, three in the back seat and two inside the trunk” of the car, the statement said.

The latest killings bore the hallmarks of the vicious gangland slayings that have terrorised large areas of Mexico as drug cartels battle it out among themselves and with security forces.

More than 30,000 people have been killed since 2006 when the government of President Felipe Calderon launched a major military crackdown against the drug gangs. Last year alone, a record 12,000 murders were blamed on the drug violence.

The newspaper Reforma, however, said messages left with the bodies were signed by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the fugitive leader of the Sinaloa cartel, who warned rivals against encroaching on his turf. Authorities would not confirm the report. The private consultancy Stratford, in its latest report on Mexican drug trafficking, said Guzman has joined the Gulf cartel and La Familia in an alliance called the New Federation.

Guerrero, the southwestern state where Acapulco is located, is a stronghold of La Familia, a notoriously bloody cartel that has been waging a war with the equally dangerous Zetas and its ally the Pacifico Sur.

The Pacifico Sur cartel has been blamed for the September 30 kidnapping of 20 Mexican tourists who are believed to have been mistaken for La Familia rivals.

The tourists’ bodies were unearthed a month later in a mass grave near Acapulco.

A boss and spiritual leader of La Familia, Nazario Moreno, was reported killed December 9 in a shoot-out with Mexican troops in his hometown in the western state of Michoacan.