China's prosecutors investigated 41,531 officials in 32,439 cases of embezzlement, bribery, dereliction of duty and other work-related crimes last year, the top procuratorial body said Friday.

Among the investigated, 32,176 were implicated in cases of embezzlement and bribery, while 9,355 were in connection to dereliction of duty or infringement of people's rights, Qiu Xueqiang, deputy procurator general of the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP), told Xinhua in an interview.

Qiu said prosecutors had focused on work-related crimes, commercial bribery that disrupted the economy, and crimes that related to people's livelihood, seriously infringed on people's interests or affected social stability.

The punishment of eight ministerial-level officials, including Huang Songyou, former vice president of the Supreme People's Court, and Wang Yi, vice president of the state-run China Development Bank, last year showed the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee's determination to eliminate corruption, he said.

The direct economic loss resulting from dereliction of duty was put at 8.2 billion yuan (120 million U.S. dollars) last year, he said.

More than 5,400 law enforcement personnel and judiciary staff were investigated and punished for duty dereliction last year, he added.

The SPP had called for public engagement to ensure transparency of prosecutorial bodies' supervision and its law enforcement procedure.

As the country's economy developed, work-related crimes were getting more intricate and harder to detect, Qiu said, adding new crimes using advanced technologies and trans-national crimes in which illicit gains were transferred to areas outside the Chinese mainland were on the rise.

There was still room, he said, for improvement with regard to procuratorial bodies' law enforcement capacity, equipment and detection method in the fight against corruption.