MACAO, Feb. 8 (Xinhuanet) -- China's Macao Special Administrative Region(SAR) recorded 9,786 crime cases in the year 2004, a decrease of 1.4 percent from the previous year.

Macao Secretary for Security Cheong Kuok Va said at a press conference on Monday that most types of the crimes in the region went down, except for cases of fa lse money and drug trafficking, which showed a significant increase in numbers.

He said that Macao's growing number of individual travelers from the mainland had had"no serious impact" on the city's public security situation.

He pointed out that only seven in every 100,000 individual visitors had violated laws during their stay in Macao last year, when Macao logged 3.5 million individual travelers from China's mainland.

The top security official said Macao's police forces would reinforce combat against theft, which would attaint Macao's tourist image. The department would continue to strengthen cross-border cooperation with their counterparts in neighboring Guangdong Province and Hong Kong to fight against illegal immigration, drug trafficking and employment of illegally imported labors.

The crime rate in Macao has sustained a downturn since it returned to the motherland in 1999. Prior to that, gangland violence used to infringe the city's gaming industry, which blackened Macao's international image in the 1990s. Crimes involving in the use of gang violence has basically eradicated here in recent years with the strong support of the Chinese central government.