Murders linked to drugs gangs in Mexico more than doubled in 2008, the country's top prosecutor has said.

Eduardo Medina Mora, Mexico's attorney general, said gang killings had risen by 117 per cent to 5,376 in the first 11 months of 2008, compared to 2,477 in the same period of 2007.

The latest figures mean that drug gang-related violence in Mexico has killed a total of 8,150 people since Felipe Calderon became president in December 2006.

The news also comes as the US government has begun releasing funds from an anti-drug aid package aimed at supporting Mexico in its fight against the cartels.

Government crackdown

The government said a record 943 people were killed in the month of November alone, mostly in the northern border states of Chihuahua and Baja California, which hold key drugs trafficking routes into the United States, and in the northwestern drug-producing state of Sinaloa, Medina Mora said.

In Chihuahua alone 13 people were killed on Monday, in attacks widely blamed on drugs gangs.

Mexico has seen a sharp rise in drugs-related violence, as drugs gangs fight increasingly bitter battles over lucrative trade routes and amid a government crackdown on their activities launched almost two years ago, by Calderon.

The operation included the deployment of 36,000 soldiers across the nation.

However Mexican law enforcement has also been hit by the biggest corruption scandal in a decade in recent months, after several high-ranking officials in the police and prosecutors' offices were detained or charged for allegedly passing information to the drugs cartels.

The US government last week released $197 million to Mexico in the first part of a $400m aid package to help fight the drug cartels.

However Medina Mora said that Washington's aid was "important, but not that much given the figure," adding that Mexico had invested around nine billion dollars in anti-drug efforts.