TIJUANA, Mexico Two men were slain and hung from a bridge, another was decapitated and a fourth was shot to death over 24 hours in Tijuana, the latest gruesome killings in a Mexican border city where hopes had risen that cartel violence was decreasing.

The bodies of two men were found hanging from the Los Alamos bridge early Friday, said Fermin Gomez, Baja California state's deputy attorney general for organized crime.

Both victims had their hands and feet bound and one had his head covered with a black plastic bag. One of the bodies fell into traffic when the rope broke.

A day earlier, a human head was found underneath another bridge in Tijuana, which sits across from San Diego, California. The body of the 24-year-old man was found 12 hours later alongside the highway from Tijuana to the beach town of Ensenada.

Gomez said the victim, Victor Ramirez, had recently been deported from the United States, though he had no information on the circumstances.

Also Thursday, a man was shot to death while leaving his house in the exclusive Tijuana neighborhood of Chapultepec, and two other people were wounded in a shootout on one of the city's main avenues.

Gomez blamed the killings on feuding between drug-dealing gangs, but declined to give details.

Beheadings, massacres and body hangings had initially declined in Tijuana since the January arrest of Teodoro "El Teo" Garcia Simental, one of two crime bosses who had been waging a *la*hdy turf war in the city.

President Felipe Calderon even visited Tijuana last month and touted it as a success story in his nearly four-year-old drug war, noting during a festival to promote the city's industries that homicides are down from a peak in 2008.