Former Chinese vice minister of public security Li Jizhou has been charged with bribery in a new anti-corruption drive that has snared 104 senior officials, the Xinhua news agency reported Thursday.
Li, whose name has been repeatedly linked with a vast smuggling scandal in the southeastern province of Fujian, accepted a "huge" quantity of bribes, said deputy procurator general Zhao Dengju.
Zhao told a press conference in Beijing that Li was among 104 high ranking officials at the level of mayor or above investigated for graft in the first eight months of this year.
He said 23,000 cases of corruption had been probed during that period which had led to the recovery of 1.587 billion yuan (190 million dollars).
China's communist government is currently undertaking a massive drive against rampant corruption that has unearthed a string of scandals across the country in the past three years.
President Jiang Zemin has called the struggle against systematic graft a "matter of life and death" for the Communist Party.
Courts in five cities in the southeastern province of Fujian this week opened trials linked to China's biggest ever corruption scandal, a 10-billion-dollar smuggling scam based in the port of Xiamen -- BEIJING(AFP)
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