China will strengthen efforts to bring back corrupt officials who have fled abroad and several notorious criminals are expected to be repatriated to the country this year, according to a former senior security official?yesterday.

Speaking on the sidelines of the ongoing annual session of the 10th National People's Congress, Zhu Entao, former assistant minister of public security, said that Beijing is working hard on the extradition issue with foreign countries to bring back the criminals.

Among them are Lai Changxing, Yang Xiuzhu, Xu Chaofan and Xu Guojun, leading characters in three separate embezzlement cases which involve billions of yuan of State-owned assets.

Zhu said that after Yu Zhendong, former president of the Kaiping branch of Bank of China in Guangdong Province was brought back to China in 2004, his accomplices, the two Xus, have been indicted in the United States and are likely to be extradited this year.

The Canadian Government is evaluating the extradition of Lai Changxing, the culprit who fled to Canada in 1999 after being involved in a series of shocking bribery cases in Xiamen of east China's Fujian Province, said Zhu, an NPC deputy.

"Once the evaluation is finished, he will be sent back," he said.

And Yang Xiuzhu, the former deputy director of the Construction Department of east China's Zhejiang Province who was arrested in the Netherlands last year, is going through the legal procedure for extradition.

"We are confident that these people will ultimately be brought back," he said.

In recent years, the country has been shocked by cases of senior officials or bankers fleeing the country after embezzling or misappropriating huge amounts of money.

Jia Chunwang, procurator-general of the Supreme People's Procuratorate, said in his work report on Saturday that 703 corrupt officials who tried to flee were detained last year and more than 7.4 billion yuan (US$912 million) recovered from them.

Zhu also warned that overseas-organized criminal groups were trying to infiltrate the mainland and said his ministry would step up efforts to nail them this year.

(China Daily March 13, 2006)