CANCUN, Mexico (AP) -Moving to halt a bloody drug war in this popular beach resort, a top Mexican investigator arrested a key federal official and several others Wednesday as part of a probe into the killings of nine people, including three federal agents.

The arrests came after security forces surrounded the federal attorney general’s office here and interrogated those inside. Lead investigator Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos said everyone who worked in the office was under suspicion of having links to traffickers.

Miguel Angel Hernandez, who headed the Cancun federal attorney’s office, and local police official Felipe de Jesus Arguelles were among a group of suspects flown to Mexico City late Wednesday night, Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha said.

Santiago Vasconcelos, Mexico’s top drug and organized crime prosecutor, said rival traffickers working for reputed drug lord Joaquin Guzman and imprisoned Osiel Cardenas, the reputed head of the Gulf cartel, are suspected in the nine killings.

He said the violence appeared aimed at returning the region to its former role as a major drug corridor.

“We could be witnessing a sort of territorial struggle between these two gangs,” Santiago Vasconcelos said. “Remember that the coasts of Quintana Roo were for many years an ideal shipping point for drug shipments. We can’t allow that to happen again.”

Once a tiny village home to a few hundred fisherman, Cancun blossomed into a major beach resort in recent decades and is now marked by high-rise hotels, and eardrum pounding bars and nightclubs, attracting more than 2 million visitors a year.

Quintana Roo, the state that includes Cancun, was a major drug trafficking route throughout the 1990s, when then-Gov. Mario Villanueva allegedly helped Mexico’s Juarez cartel move tons of Colombian cocaine by boat, airplane and truck along the coast.

Villanueva disappeared after leaving office in 1999 and spent two years on the run before being captured in Cancun in 2001, the same year reputed kingpin Alcides Ramon Magana was taken into custody.

The arrests were supposed to have severely weakened the Cancun smuggling ring, but may have simply opened the door for the Gulf cartel to move in.

The violence has mostly occurred in parts of Cancun that tourists don’t visit. Strolling along a Cancun boulevard, tourist Steve Rotunno from Detroit and others appeared unaffected by the events.

“I’m not scared,” said Rotunno, noting that there’s violence back home as well.

For some residents, however, the recent events have conjured up memories of the 1990s drug era.

“There were drugs back then, but there weren’t massacres like now,” said taxi driver Oscar Herrera.

Santiago Vasconcelos said it appears the three agents found shot in the head on Nov. 25 along with two other victims had information the drug smugglers wanted. Four other charred bodies were found in a separate location, in a burned-out car.

A day later, two other agents from the Federal Agency of Investigation were discovered before dawn outside Cancun with gunshot wounds to their legs.

The dead agents, who were members of the elite Federal Agency of Investigation, the Mexican equivalent of the FBI, did not appear to have been working with drug gangs, as has been the case in the past, Santiago Vasconcelos said.

Hit men working for Cardenas and Guzman have fought bloody street battles in the northern border cities of Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros for more than a year, in a dispute for control of that lucrative drug route.

Guzman escaped from a federal prison in 2001, and Cardenas was arrested in 2003, but allegedly continues to run his gang from behind bars.

AP-ES-12-01-04 2331EST