Tijuana Plans Assault on Drug War : Crime: State and local authorities will join federal police and Mexican soldiers in an attempt to arrest suspects in the latest round of drug-related slayings.

The gruesome slayings of six suspected drug traffickers in Baja California are apparently connected to a war among drug cartels based in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, Baja state police said Wednesday.

The dead men were tortured, strangled and shot execution-style, then dumped Tuesday near Tecate and Ensenada, police said--the bloodiest incident in a surge of violent crime that has caused political and public outcry in Tijuana.

State and local police will join federal police and Mexican army personnel in an operation aimed at arresting suspects in the six killings and controlling street crime overall, state authorities announced Wednesday.

Police will stop suspicious vehicles and people at checkpoints around Tijuana, said state police Cmdr. Juan Jose Sanchez Gutierrez. Soldiers will set up similar roadblocks in rural areas and crack down on people carrying guns illegally, he said.

“We are going to work together to try to stop these kinds of incidents,” Sanchez said, adding that police believe the killers are still in the Tijuana area.

Twenty federal narcotics investigators have been dispatched from Mexico City to join the investigation, he said.

The victims found Tuesday have not been identified, Sanchez said, but investigators believe the six men, ranging in age from 25 to 35, were from Sinaloa. Their deaths probably resulted from a feud in that state among criminal organizations involved in smuggling drugs across the Tijuana-San Diego border, authorities said.

Four of the bodies were found Tuesday morning next to a coastal highway north of Ensenada, and two others were found bound and gagged 15 miles east of Tijuana, on a road to Tecate. The condition of the bodies indicated that the men had been beaten and tortured; at least two of them had several fingers cut off before they were shot in the head, police said. Several were also garroted, police said.

The torture-style slayings resemble drug-related murders that have occurred recently in Sinaloa and other Mexican states, police said.

The slayings follow 26 homicides reported in Tijuana since the start of the year, a number that far outpaces previous years, authorities said.

Several of those crimes, including the spectacular slaying last month of a state police officer who was machine-gunned in front of his house, are attributed to fighting among drug traffickers.

Miguel Cervantes Sahagun contributed to this story.