Police officials announced on Thursday that Chinese border police had cracked 12,449 criminal cases in 2007 including drug, arms and human trafficking, as well as smuggling.

They also dealt with 37,603 minor public security offenses.

Border police, or the Frontier Defense Force (FDF), cracked 3,071 drug smuggling cases and seized a variety of banned substances with a total weight of 2,368 kilograms. They also broke up 46 gun trafficking cases and seized 1,085 weapons and more than 20,000 bullets.

The FDF also dealt with 1,496 human trafficking cases involving 3,000 people and arrested 425 criminal suspects. Border police cracked 1,702 smuggling cases involving 431 million yuan (about 59 million U.S. dollars) in illicit funds. The sum rose by 87.4 percent from 2006.

Special campaigns were launched to fight human trafficking in 2007, said an official with the FDF on Thursday. Several provinces including Heilongjiang, Liaoning, Jilin, Zhejiang and Fujian jointly launched an anti-human trafficking campaign in June, and they dealt with 256 such cases in which 219 suspects were arrested.

From April to August, border police in Guangdong Province launched a series of four special campaigns to crack down on foreigners illegally entering Hong Kong. They spotted 74 such cases involving 231 persons.

In a bid to block an influx of drugs from the so-called Golden Crescent -- a region of Central Asia that includes Afghanistan -- FDF personnel in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region reinforced border controls and port checks with drug-detecting facilities. They cracked five such cases, arrested seven criminal suspects and seized 7.8805 kg of heroin.

At present, China has 1,547 border police stations staffed by 6,360 border police.

(Xinhua News Agency January 18, 2008)