Chinese police authorities registered 18,000 homicide cases in 2006, down 13.7 percent from the previous year.

The Ministry of Public Security (MPS) announced the figure on Tuesday at a regular press conference.

The year 2006 saw 6,701 arson cases in China, down 12.8 percent from 2005, 782 explosion cases, down 20 percent from 2005 and 32,000 rape cases down 4 percent.

Although the number of "serious violent criminal cases" dropped markedly, the total number of criminal cases reached 4.653 million in 2006, almost the same as 2005.

Police authorities also detected 3.144 million theft cases and 502,000 mugging and robbery cases in 2006.

Police authorities detected 79,000 drug-trafficking cases, down 16.4 percent from the previous year, 21,000 gambling cases, down 21.1 percent, 11,000 prostitution related cases, down 5.4 percent and 2,854 porn publication producing and selling cases, down 9.8 percent.

Police arrested 679,000 juvenile criminal suspects in 2006, down 5.5 percent from 2005 and accounting for 46.8 percent of the total number of the arrested criminal suspects in 2006.

90 PERCENT HOMICIDE, MANSLAUGHTER CASES SOLVED

According to Yu Xinmin, vice director of the MPS crime investigation bureau, 91.4 percent of homicide and manslaughter cases were solved in 2006, a record high.

Yu said homicide and manslaughter cases were priorities for the police. He denied that the high solution rate was related to the extraction of confessions under torture.

He said technology had helped policemen solve many criminal cases. Fingerprint identification and DNA collection technology have improved remarkably. A DNA database has been made available to grassroots police bureaus to aid investigation.

He said that measures had been introduced to prevent police from extorting confessions through torture, including videotaping the whole interrogation process.

(Xinhua News Agency February 7, 2007)