Police in Guangdong have arrested 20 loan sharks notorious for lending money to gamblers who blow it all in the casinos of Macao.

Suspects including Hong Kong and Macao residents have been detained, according to He Guifu, director of the Social Security Department under the Guangdong Provincial Bureau of Public Security, yesterday.

Gangs once active in prosperous cities in the Pearl River Delta were mainly in charge of collecting loans that originated from loan sharks in Macao.

The gangs have also been involved in homicides, He said yesterday.

Four people were arrested for murder in the city of Zhongshan in March, and during interrogation they admitted belonging to a Macao loan shark gang.

They were convicted of killing a local clinic owner who failed to repay debts valued at more than 1.8 million yuan (US$216,000).

In March, police in Zhuhai arrested 16 loan shark suspects.

The gang kidnapped four mainlanders who lost large sums of money and borrowed from the Macao loan sharks to repay their debts.

The prisoners were kept in a wooden hut for two days until police got them out.

By the end of May, Guangdong police had dealt with 19,385 gambling and related cases, detaining 66,655 suspected gamblers.

Of them, 51 were involved in Internet gambling and 6,665 were related to underground "Liuhecai" gambling.

"Liuhecai" is similar to the betting game "Mark Six" in Hong Kong and is illegal on the mainland.

Meanwhile, almost 50 million yuan (US$5.93 million) in cash that was to be used for gambling, plus 2.44 million Hong Kong dollars (US$313,000) has been seized.

Police also seized five guns from underground gambling locations in the province, He said.

Guangdong has uncovered the largest number of gambling cases and detained the biggest number of suspects in the country since the beginning of the year.

In May, Shenzhen police cracked a big secret gambling case in the city's Longgang District. Thirty-four suspects, including 29 Taiwan residents, were gambling in a local factory and were hauled in.

He admitted that stamping out gambling would be a long-term and tough task in the province.

But, he pledged that Guangdong police would do what they could to stop illegal gambling.

Guangdong's achievements in fighting the crime have been praised by the Ministry of Public Security, according to the director.

(China Daily May 30, 2005)