MEXICO CITY - Gunmen stormed into a cemetery in southern Mexico and stole the buried corpse of a suspected drug gang hitman killed days earlier in a shootout, local officials said on Thursday.

A municipal police officer searches a schoolboy's rucksack at a road block in the resort town of Acapulco February 23, 2007. [Reuters]

The four armed men broke into the graveyard in the town of Poza Rica, Veracruz state, on Tuesday night, tied up a security guard, smashed Roberto Carlos Carmona's gravestone with hammers and made off with the coffin containing his corpse.

The bodysnatchers have not been identified, a spokeswoman for the local attorney general's office said.

"We are investigating," she said, adding that the body's whereabouts was also unknown.

State interior secretary Reynaldo Escobar confirmed on Wednesday that the body was that of Carmona, an alleged member of the "Zetas" - a band of ex-soldiers who fight rival drug gangs on behalf of the powerful Gulf cartel.

Carmona was peppered with bullets on Saturday during clandestine horse racing in the town of Villarin, near Veracruz port, after a row over a tight race. He was buried on Monday.

Veracruz state is not used to the gangland-style shootings that plague cartel-controlled northern Mexico.

Saturday's horse race saw bets of up to $358,000, local media reported, and the attorney general's spokeswoman said the spectators were all from outside Veracruz, many from northern states.

Mexico has seen an surge in grisly killings and daylight shootings as drug gangs battle for cocaine smuggling routes to the United States. President Felipe Calderon has sent thousands of troops to hotspots in northern and western Mexico.