MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -- Mexico's government on Friday named a special commissioner to head a probe into the gruesome murders of hundreds of women over the last decade in a notorious border city.

Interior Minister Santiago Creel said Maria Guadalupe Morfin, a former government human rights commissioner for the western state of Jalisco will take up the post, although her duties are still unclear.

After 10 years of investigations marred by negligence and bungling, Mexican police are starting from scratch in their search for the killers of 320 women in Ciudad Juarez, a gritty city of two million across the border from El Paso, Texas.

Most of the women were gang raped, tortured, brutally killed and dumped in anonymous graves.

The body of a woman battered to death and wrapped in a plastic bag was found on Tuesday in the city, a day after U.S. lawmakers urged their government to give Mexico financial and technical aid to clear up the murders.

Federal authorities have essentially discarded an earlier theory that some of the often macabre and grisly murders were linked to organ trafficking.

Ciudad Juarez is home to one of Mexico's most ruthless drug cartels, as well as hundreds of "maquiladoras," factories mass-producing goods for export, which employ much of the female population around the clock.

Some of the murder victims were snatched on their way home from the factories, others were students. Most were between 13 and 25.