Police in south China's Guangdong Province have established special taskforces to investigate what has become a spate of murder-dismemberment cases.

In the latest cases, two dismembered bodies were found this weekend in Guangzhou and Foshan.

The emergence of these cases follows the arrest this weekend of two suspects for the murder and dismemberment of a third victim in an unrelated case.

"Police are investigating the two cases and have promised to solve them soon," a police officer from the Guangdong Provincial Bureau of Public Security said yesterday.

In the most recent case, environmental sanitation workers found human body parts wrapped in three yellow plastic bags in the Shijing River in Guangzhou's Baiyun District on Sunday afternoon.

Police quickly secured the scene and took the body parts to the lab for further investigation. Police suspect the victim was a black man.

On Saturday, a woman's body parts were discovered in three refrigerators at the store she ran in Xiabei Village, in Foshan's Nanhai District. The woman's head and legs are still missing.

The woman, who was thought to be in her 30s, was a native of Hunan Province. Her husband, an employee at a local molding factory, has been detained for questioning. The couple apparently quarrelled regularly.

And in the earliest case, police arrested a couple suspected of killing and dismembering a man and then sending his body parts to three different cities in cardboard boxes. The man had apparently had an affair with the woman suspect, who was a prostitute.

Liu Ancheng, director of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Guangdong Provincial Bureau of Public Security, said police were working to solve every homicide case in this province in South China.

Guangdong has the country's highest crime rate.

Liu told a press conference in the provincial capital of Guangzhou yesterday that police would work to uphold social order. "Guangdong will never become a haven for criminals from the mainland or abroad," he said.

Liu hinted that provincial authorities were planning to launch more anti-crime campaigns in the near future.

The crime rate in Guangdong usually peaks around the lunar new year, which falls on February 18 this year, because of the warm weather in the province.

Liu said Guangdong police would spare no effort in their fight against crime during the new year holiday.

In addition to homicide, the special campaigns will also target street theft, breaking and entering and organized crime.

Guangdong police have also promised to expand police patrols in business districts and on major streets. And new police stations will be built along the province's expressways in the coming months.

Liu said police had launched a campaign code-named Yueying 3, or Guangdong Eagle 3, on December 25 that had yielded positive results.

Between December 25 and January 12, Guangdong police solved 2,596 criminal cases, including 41 homicides, and detained 2,397 suspects.

The campaign is also thought to have reduced the number of criminal gangs and triads operating in the province.

Yueying 3 will wrap up at the end of March.

Police have also solved 467 drug and related cases, seizing 11.6 kilograms of heroine, 789 kilograms of ice and more than 1.59 million ecstasy pills in the past three weeks.

(China Daily January 16, 2007)