Mexico City, Sep 17 (IANS/EFE): A group of hackers launched a massive attack on the web pages of several Mexican government agencies in order to block user access, officials said.

The interior ministry said in a communique that the federal government detected massive simultaneous hits on some of its agencies' web sites on the Internet, visits geared to saturate the pages and make their usual services inaccessible to the public.

In a video released on YouTube, a group of hackers using the name Anonymous took credit for the cyber attack as part of an "Independence Operation" calculated to "make the government tremble".

The spokespersons for the group called on the general population not to attend Thursday night's "El Grito" (The Cry) ceremony that traditionally kicks off the celebration of Mexican Independence.

The group says that Mexicans live in constant fear of organized crime and accuses the government of not listening to the voice of the people demanding an end to the violence.

The interior ministry said in a communique that despite this attack, data security and the intranet used by federal government agencies "are not at risk".

An intranet is typically an internal network connected to the outside Internet only through one or more gateway computers.

For its part, the Public Safety Department confirmed the attack and said that on Thursday there occurred a "brutal and unusual number of hits by simulated users, causing the site's firewall defense system to activate".

Officials at the department said that this was not a classic attack of hackers getting into the network to alter web sites, though they acknowledged that an attack by simulated users was detected.