Police in northeastern China have arrested 96 "snakeheads" or human smugglers and cracked 68 cases of illegal immigration during a three month anti-crime campaign, state press said Thursday.
The arrests of both domestic and foreign snakeheads were made along Liaoning province's 2,000-kilometer (1,200-mile) coastline and some 160 kilometers (100 miles) of border with North Korea, the Legal Daily said.
The crackdown was part of the ongoing "strike hard" campaign against crime, it said.
The report did not detail how many snakeheads were Chinese and how many were foreign, nor how many illegal emigrants were involved.
China's northeast is increasingly becoming a center for illegal emigration, with people often stowing away in dangerous shipping containers destined for South Korea or Japan and then Western countries.
The region, once the industrial heartland of the country, is also an area undergoing painful restructuring of inefficient state enterprises that has left millions unemployed -- BEIJING (AFP)
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