China breaks more than 1,300 organized crime gangs

BEIJING, Nov. 24 (Xinhua) -- Chinese police have cracked more than 1,300 criminal gangs in the latest campaign against organized crime, authorities said.

Between March and October, Chinese prisons received 887 new inmates charged for gang crime, Hu Yiding, deputy director of prison administration under the Ministry of Justice said. By the end of October, police had referred 196 cases of alleged organized crime for prosecution and 1,347 crime gangs had been broken, according to the office for national campaign against organized crime. This shows that the campaign against organized crime has been effective, said a spokesman for the office.

In China, organized crime gangs are sometimes protected by officials through bribery, threat or other means. Prosecutors had been exposing the "umbrellas" covering gangs, with 33 cases uncovered involving 47 official, said Huang Hailong, deputy director of the investigation and supervision department of the Supreme People's Procuratorate. In the first ten months this year, 716 people were convicted of organized crime, including 711 charged of organizing, leading or taking part in organized crime gangs and five of cover-up and connivance, Gao Jinghong, deputy director of the office and a judge of the Supreme People's Court. "The number will be much larger if we consider convicts of other criminal charges from the crime gangs," he said.

Imprisonment over five years, life sentence and death sentence for the organized crime convicts account for 51.37 percent, 34 percent more than other crimes for the same period, Gao said. Meanwhile, police put 3.75 million criminal cases on file for investigation in the first ten months, 41,000 fewer, or 1.1 percent down, from the same period last year and the number of cases resolved increased by 113,000 to 2.21 million, the office said. The number of severe violent cases including murder, rape and arson respectively dropped by 13.8 percent, 5.9 percent, 13.8 percent in the first ten months. "After the crackdown of crime gangs, the social life and security order have evidently improved in some areas," the office spokesman said.

After Beijing police broke the 17-member-gang headed by Lei Nagang, in suburban Beijing, which long haunted the local people by racketeering and fighting, local police station did not receive report of criminal cases for consecutive 161 days in the first eight months this year, the spokesman said. "In general, public security has been relatively stable this year," a spokesman for the office said.

The Supreme People's Court is supervising 63 major organized crime cases and paying close attention to the trial progress of these cases.

Xinhua 2006-11-23