The Spanish police said Friday that they had arrested three suspected computer hackers in connection with recent cyberattacks on Sony’s PlayStation Network

The Spanish police said Friday that they had arrested three suspected computer hackers in connection with recent cyberattacks on Sony’s PlayStation Network as well as corporate and government Web sites around the world.

The arrests have dismantled the local leadership of the shadowy international network of computer hackers known as Anonymous, which has claimed responsibility for a wide variety of attacks, the National Police said in a statement.

According to the statement, Anonymous is made up of people from various countries organized into cells that share common goals. The activists operate anonymously, but in a coordinated fashion.

One of the “hacktivist” detainees, a 31-year-old man, was arrested in the southern city of Almería sometime after May 18, the police said. He had a computer server in his apartment in the northern port city of Gijón, from which the group attacked the Web sites of the Sony PlayStation online gaming store.

The same computer was also employed in coordinated cyber-attacks against two Spanish banks, BBVA and Bankia, the Italian energy company Enel, as well as government sites in Spain, Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Iran, Chile, Colombia and New Zealand, the police said.

The police opened their investigation last October, after hackers overwhelmed the Spanish Ministry of Culture’s Web site to protest Spanish legislation increasing punishments for illegal downloads.

The two other suspects were arrested in Barcelona and Valencia. The statement did not make clear the timing of those arrests.

It was not immediately clear if the group had been the sole, or even the main, perpetrator of the recent attacks on Sony. About a dozen Sony Web sites and services around the world have been hacked, with the biggest breaches forcing the Tokyo-based company to shut down its popular PlayStation Network for a month beginning in April.

The Japanese company has acknowledged that hackers compromised personal data for tens of millions of user accounts. Earlier this month, a separate hacker collective called Lulz Security said it had breached a Sony Pictures site and released vital source codes.

Sony has estimated that the hacker attacks will cost it at least 14 billion yen, or $173 million, in damages, including information technology spending, legal costs, lower sales and free offers to lure back customers.

Mami Imada, a Sony spokeswoman in Tokyo, said she had no information on the arrests and declined to comment.

The police said that they had analyzed more than 2 million lines of chat logs since October, as well as Web pages used by the group to identify the leadership in Spain “with the capacity to make decisions and direct attacks.”

Anonymous members made use of a computer program called LOIC to crash Web sites by flooding them with denial of service attacks, the police said.

Among recent attacks, the hackers also brought down the site of the Spanish National Electoral Commission last month before regional and municipal elections. It was that attack, on May 18, that led to the arrest in Almería.

The movement against the anti-piracy law has been closely linked to the broader youth-led political movement that have occupied Puerta del Sol in Madrid and other city squares since May 15.

These protests have called for a complete overhaul of Spain’s political system — and the laws targeting illegal downloading.