China's Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) recorded 4,637 crime cases in the first six months, representing a decrease of 5.3 percent on the same period last year.

Macao Secretary for Security Cheong Kuok Va said at a press conference on Tuesday that most types of the crime rate in the region went down, except for cases of false money and drug trafficking, which showed a significant increase in numbers.

He said that Macao's growing number of individual travellers from the mainland had had "no serious impact" on the city's public security situation.

He pointed out that only five in 100,000 individual visitors from the mainland had violated the law during their stay in Macao in the first half of the year, when Macao welcomed some 1.8 million individual tourists from the mainland.

Cheong also said that while most types of crimes had decreased in the first six months, the number of cases concerning false money had grown significantly, from 30 cases reported in the first half of last year to 158 cases in the first six months this year.

The top security official attributed the rise to the fact that criminals assumed that mainland tourists were unfamiliar with Macao currencies and foreign currencies.

"While the general crime rate went down, the police are never satisfied with the situation," Cheong said referring that the Macao Security Forces would pay more attention to the drug trafficking cases that rose from 29 cases in the first half of last year to 50 cases in the same period this year.

He said Macao's police forces would continue to strengthen the cross-border co-operation with their counterparts in neighboring Guangdong Province and Hong Kong to fight against illegal immigration, drug trafficking and employment of illegally imported labors.

The crime rate in Macao has sustained a downturn since it returned to the motherland in 1999. Prior to that, gangland violence used to infringe the city's gaming industry, which blackened Macao's international image in the 1990s. Crimes involving in the use of gang violence has basically eradicated in recent years with the strong support of the Chinese central government.

(Xinhua News Agency August 3, 2004)