Chinese police had a better rate of success at cracking murder cases last year, officials said on Monday, strongly slamming the remarks that forced confessions were behind the good results.

Of the more than 31,000 murder cases in China in 2005, almost 90 percent were solved, and the number of people murdered per 100,000 of the population was only just over 2, police officials said.

The credit was due to good police work under the slogan adopted in 2004 of "homicide cases must be broken," said He Ting, head of the public security ministry's criminal investigation department.

"The campaign has been greatly successful," He told a news conference. "It was due to the blood and sweat of a million police and security people."

In recent years, China has come under pressure from an increasingly feisty media to crack down on forced confessions and torture after several cases.

Last year, China freed a man who spent 11 years in jail for allegedly murdering his wife after the woman turned up alive. The man, She Xianglin, said he had confessed to the crime under torture.

In another case, the children of a Chinese butcher executed for murdering a waitress appealed against his conviction after his "victim" turned up alive.

He said such cases were very rare.

"Over the past few years we have taken measures against the practice of forced confessions. Such cases are happening less and less now," he said.

"It is not a serious problem," He added.

China has in the past recognised there was a problem, last year passing a bill mandating punishment for police who torture detainees during interrogation.

He said interrogations were recorded and prosecutors operated independently of police, asking detainees to sign papers saying they were not forced into confessing crimes.

"Police chasing homicide cases must guarantee the quality of their work and be impartial, enforcing the law and punishing criminals and certainly not wronging innocent people," He said.

But he admitted there was still a problem solving murders in certain areas, mainly in the poor, rural northwest and western parts of the country, where police could also not guarantee interrogations would be recorded.

"The country is very big, economic development uneven and police resources are limited," he said.

(Agencies via Chinadaily.com.cn May 16, 2006)