China will send its second group of riot police to Haiti next April, according to the Public Security Bureau of south China's Guangdong Province.

On Saturday, a team of 125 policemen and border-guard soldiers from Guangdong headed for Langfang, a city in north China's Hebei Province, for training.

The 125-member force, which includes four women, will join up with a multinational force on the troubled island next year. The force is specially trained for riots and crowd control.

Ninety-five Chinese riot police, including 13 women, left Beijing for Haiti in October, the first Chinese troops to be deployed to the Western Hemisphere.

China has joined peacekeeping missions since 2000 in East Timor, Liberia and Kosovo, among other places, but it had never sent combat troops overseas before.

(Xinhua News Agency December 19, 2004)