China's courts have convicted 12,796 people in connection with 1,171 cases of organized crime since the beginning of 2006, a senior official of the Supreme People's Court (SPC) said Tuesday.

Since the beginning of 2006, China's courts have convicted 12,796 people in connection with 1,171 cases of organized crime.

Around 6,700 people convicted in more than 720 of the cases had exhausted the appeals process, said Gao Jinghong, director of the SPC office on gang crime crackdown.

More than 3,100, or 46 percent of them, had received prison terms of more than five years, life imprisonment or even the death penalty.

Major cases dealt with by the courts during the three-year crackdown are:

-- Song Pengfei was sentenced to death in November, 2008 in the northeastern province of Liaoning, on 14 charges including organizing and leading criminal organizations, and murder.

Investigation on Song followed a murder case in 2005 in Shenyang during which two people were gunned down and four others seriously injured.

According to a SPC report, Song was found to have organized a gang of unemployed people, ex-convicts and criminals in 1993, and illegally monopolized transportation routes from Liaoning's Shenyang city to Guangzhou in the eastern province of Guangdong through violence.

Investigations into Song also led to Ren Shiwei and Hao Wanchun, heads of two separate gangs in Shenyang. Ren and Hao were sentences to life imprisonment and death sentences with a reprieve in 2008 for murder among other charges.

The police confiscated 78 guns, 1,987 bullets and three grenades during the investigation. More than 160 people involved in Song, Ren and Hao's criminal organizations were sentenced to death, and life or fixed imprisonment terms.

-- Lu Baoyi, 52, was sentenced to death in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang in May, 2008, for organizing and leading criminal organizations, and group brawls.

Lu Baoyi and his brothers Lu Baocheng and Lu Baolin were found to have organized a gang of ex-convicts and unemployed people in Liaoning's Anda city in 1992, and had since been engaged in group brawls, assaults, rapes, organizing prostitution, usury, and bribery until 2006.