MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Nine male bodies were found in the back of a pickup truck, abandoned by the side of a road, in the violent Mexican state of Guerrero, the state attorney general’s office said in a statement on Saturday.

State prosecutors were investigating the suspected murders, the statement said. It added that the bodies, discovered around 9 a.m. on Saturday on a road near the town of Tixtla, appeared to be those of a group that had been missing from near Tixtla since Thursday.

More than 200,000 people have been murdered in Mexico since 2007, when the country’s militarized drug war began. One of the top suppliers of heroin to the United States, Guerrero, in southwestern Mexico, has become one of the country’s most violent states, as drug gangs battle for control of the trade.