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Police found two headless corpses in Ciudad Juarez linked to a massacre of partygoers last week in the city, amid drug violence that also killed a US citizen near a bridge to Texas.The bodies were discovered in a parked van with a note linking them to a drug cartel and the murder of 14 people, most of them teenagers and children, gunned down Friday at a birthday party in the northern border city known as Mexico’s crime capital.

A 25-year-old American was shot to death outside a restaurant in Ciudad Juarez near a bridge over the Rio Grande where he was heading to with his mother and grand-mother, police said.

The bodies of another four men, apparently killed by drug traffickers, were also found early Tuesday on a freeway near the Mexican capital, officials said.

“There were four dead men. They had their hands tied behind their backs,” an official in the prosecutor’s office said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

He said the men were found on the Mexico-Cuernavaca highway near the town of Temixco, some 100 kilometers (60 miles) south of Mexico’s sprawling capital.

The message left with the bodies attributed the murders to a clash between two factions of a drug cartel led by the Beltran Leyva brothers.

Authorities say the conflict has left dozens dead in recent months in Morelos state and the neighboring state of Guerrero, which includes the tourist center of Acapulco.

In southern Oaxaca state, the bodies of three men and a woman with signs of torture were found at a dump site alongside a highway near the state capital, a state official told AFP.

He said the victims appear to have been killed execution style “in some other place and then were dumped at the site.”

The latest carnage came after a string of bloodletting across Mexico.

Thirteen recovering drug addicts were gunned down at a rehab center in Tijuana late Sunday. Near the resort city of Acapulco, six men were found executed on Sunday and three other bodies were found bound on Monday.

Drug violence has claimed more than 7,000 lives nationwide in 2010, making it the deadliest year since President Felipe Calderon launched a war on drug cartels in 2006, dispatching more than 50,000 troops.

Mexico’s border regions have witnessed much of the drug conflict as cartels battle over lucrative trafficking routes into the United States.

The violence has claimed over 28,000 lives since 2006.