Mexico anti-drug official says target of hit men

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico's deputy attorney general said on Thursday that three men arrested in Mexico City last week with shoulder-fired rockets, rifles and a submachine gun were planning to kill him.

Jose Luis Santiago, the point man in the country's war on drug gangs and the official in charge of extraditing drug bosses to the United States, said the suspected hit men may belong to the Sinaloa Cartel, which dominates Mexico's Pacific Coast cocaine smuggling routes.

"It's one of the risks run by all of us who are committed," Santiago was quoted as saying in the daily Reforma newspaper's online edition.

Police stopped a car in an upscale neighborhood during a late-night check last Thursday and found the men and the weapons. Santiago said an investigation indicated they were on their way to ambush him.

President Felipe Calderon has sent more than 25,000 federal police and soldiers to hunt down drug cartels near the U.S. border and in other troubled areas around Mexico, which was hit by some 2,500 drug gang murders last year.

In northern Mexico, drug gangs frequently murder local police, judges and politicians in the middle of the conflict. But attacks on senior federal authorities are rare.

Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, head of the Sinaloa Cartel, escaped from prison in 2001 and remains at large. One of his top lieutenants was arrested this week.

(Reporting by Noel Randewich; Editing by Xavier Briand)