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Hundreds of Chinese armed police stormed a banquet and arrested dozens of leaders of two criminal gangs that controlled more than 20 factories in Guangdong.
The gangs were so influential in Yangjiang that a Vice-Minister of Public Security had to order the operation, the Beijing News said.
Police in Yangjiang had been too thoroughly infiltrated by the gangs to be called upon for the raid of the four-storey hotpot restaurant, owned by a ringleader who became a local politician in 2004.
"All policemen in Yangjiang were ordered to stay in their offices that night," it quoted an unnamed source as saying. Dozens of senior police officers in the city were sent on a sightseeing trip days earlier.
The gangs had terrorised the city for more than a decade, using violence to monopolise lucrative businesses such as transport, cooking gas and seafood, the Beijing News said.
The gangs and the factories they ran boasted a membership of about 30,000 amid surging crime accompanying the wild west economic growth in Guangdong, a manufacturing dynamo that accounts for more than 30 per cent of China's exports.
A warning shot was fired in the restaurant, where about 1000 people were dining, before the gang members were taken away with numbered black bags on their heads, it said.
- REUTERS
