Spying by the Mexican authorities is now limited to pursuing criminals, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Tuesday after the country found itself caught up in a global surveillance scandal.

"What intelligence there is has to do with fighting crime, to protect citizens, not to spy on opponents, political leaders, party leaders, owners of large companies, churches," he told reporters.

An international media investigation revealed that 15,000 Mexican smartphone numbers were among more than 50,000 believed to have been selected by clients of Israeli firm NSO Group for potential surveillance.

They include numbers linked to 25 journalists and even Lopez Obrador's inner circle before he took office. One of the hacked journalists, Cecilio Pineda, was murdered in March 2017.

Lopez Obrador's wife, children, brother and even his cardiologist were among those selected as possible targets using Pegasus malware between 2016 and 2017, according to Mexican news site Aristegui Noticias.

At the time, he was the opposition leader and political rival of then president Enrique Pena Nieto.

The leftist leader alleged that he had been spied on since the 1970s, including by the government of former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994).

He said that "no one is spied on" anymore and he did not believe a current NSO contract exists with anyone in Mexico, but if it does "it must be canceled."

According to the Pegasus Project investigation, Mexican agencies that have acquired the spyware include the defense ministry, the attorney general's office and the national security intelligence service.

The prosecutor's office said it had ordered government agencies to take measures to safeguard systems that might have been compromised.

"All federal and state security agencies that have software that monitors communications, have been ordered to protect all their data related to the use of Pegasus equipment and others like it," the prosecutor's office said in a statement.

The office also said it is investigating contracts signed off on by Tomas Zeron, who headed the criminal investigation agency in the prosecutor's office during the government of Pena Nieto.

Zeron is currently in Israel awaiting extradition for his part in the investigation into the disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa, in the southern state of Guerrero, in 2014.

The statement added that the prosecutor's agents had searched the offices of the company KBH TRACK, which it said had been conducting phone hacking for unidentified parties.

It said the telephone of Manuel Mondragon, who was also the National Security Commissioner during the Pena Nieto government, had been tapped.

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