(Updates with U.S. reaction)

MEXICO CITY, Sept 19 (Reuters) - Gunmen killed the police chief of the central Mexican state of Hidalgo on Wednesday, the state attorney general's office said, the second high-profile police murder by drug hitmen in less than a week.

Gunmen ambushed police chief Marcos Manuel Souberville on Wednesday afternoon as he traveled to a meeting. His driver was badly injured.

"He was shot more than a dozen times," a spokesman said, who added that the murder appeared to be by cartel hitmen.

In a rare U.S. reaction to a Mexican drug killing, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza said Souberville's death was tragic and that Washington and Mexico City "remained committed in this shared battle" against drug cartels. "The fight will go on," Garza said in a statement.

The Mexican government says the deployment of some 20,000 troops and federal police across Mexico is halting drug violence between warring cartels fighting for dominance of smuggling routes to the United States, citing a fall in monthly executions.

But violence has flared this month with the killing of a police chief in the central state of San Luis Potosi last Thursday and the murders of a string of police officers in the northern states of Nuevo Leon and Chihuahua.

Some 2,000 people have been killed in drug violence so far this year, the same number as in all of 2006, according to the government.

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