MEXICO CITY -- The head of Interpol Mexico, Ricardo Gutierrez Vargas, was arrested by the Mexican Attorney General's Office - or PGR - on the weekend within the scope of "Operation Clean-up," in which several top police officials have been taken into custody for their alleged links with organized crime, a government source said Tuesday.

The operation was begun in October and so far has nabbed two top officials at the SIEDO organized crime and special investigations agency, the former chief of the Federal Preventive Police, Gerardo Garay, and the director of the Regional Deployment division of the AFI (Mexico's FBI), Rodolfo de la Guardia.

The PGR announced in a communique that Gutierrez Vargas, the head of International Police Affairs and Interpol within the AFI, was taken into "preventive detention" last Sunday.

The order to take him into custody was issued by a judge who stipulated that the AG's Office could hold Gutierrez Vargas for 40 days while it investigates his possible criminal links.

The PGR did not reveal in its statement the reason why it requested that Gutierrez Vargas be arrested, but it said that it was done within the framework of "the investigations ... (in) Operation Clean-up against public servants who gave privileged information to unauthorized people."

The authorities said that the two SIEDO officials allegedly leaked information to the Beltran Leyva brothers, who run the powerful Gulf drug cartel, in exchange for large sums of money.

The Mexican government is pursuing a "war" against the drug cartels, but the latter have reacted by unleashing a wave of violence that had taken the lives of some 5,000 people so far this year. EFE