MEXICO CITY – Police found a semi-charred body along with a sign identifying the slain man as Reynaldo Coronado, purported leader of the Beltran Leyva cartel in the central Mexican city of Cuernavaca, officials said.

The Morelos Attorney General’s Office said the victim – aged 20-35 – was found Thursday morning on that state’s Cuernavaca-Tepoztlan federal highway.

The sign identified him as Reynaldo Coronado and accused him of “having been an extortioner,” the AG’s office said, although it noted that he has not yet been officially identified.

Local media said Coronado was one of the Beltran Leyva gang’s lieutenants and also said he went by the aliases “El H” or “El Ingeniero.”

The Beltran Leyva mob, which arose as a splinter group of the powerful Sinaloa cartel, was battered by the December 2009 killing of its top leader, Arturo Beltran Leyva, in a shootout with Mexican security forces near Cuernavaca and has been further weakened by the arrests of other top leaders over the past two years.

This latest killing comes amid a wave of violence among criminal gangs in Morelos, whose capital is Cuernavaca, and neighboring Guerrero state, one of the flashpoints in a drug war that has left nearly 50,000 dead over the past five years. EFE