Ex-cop's decapitated head found

[951-Riverside]

MEXICO CITY - The drug war in the southern Mexican states of Guerrero and Michoacán took a gruesome turn Thursday with the discovery of the decapitated head of a police commander who had resigned his post just days earlier in the face of death threats.

``So that you learn to respect,'' read a message scrawled on a red sheet attached to a Guerrero state government building in Acapulco, where passersby in the early morning hours discovered the heads of former police Cmdr. Mario Núñez Magana, 35, of the Municipal Preventive Police, and another man, who was not immediately identified.

Acapulco officials would not confirm news reports that identified the second victim as a police officer.

More than 140 people, including many police officers and commanders, have been killed in the western states of Guerrero and Michoacán this year as the so-called Sinaloa and Gulf cartels struggle for control of methamphetamine production, street drug sales, cocaine shipping points and other elements of a lucrative trade in illicit drugs.

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/14395282.htm