BEIJING ?Britain and China are exchanging police officials to tackle the problem of human trafficking highlighted by the deaths of 19 mainly Chinese migrants in England, a British diplomat said on Tuesday.

Seventeen men and two women died last week when they were caught by fast-rising tides as they collected cockles in more cambe Bay. Two survived.

Britain plans to post a law enforcement liaison officer to its embassy in Beijing in the next few weeks to “take forward our co-operation with the Chinese on this and on other immigration crimes,?embassy spokesman Alex Pinfield said.

A number of Chinese Ministry of Public Security officials had been seconded to the British Home Office to help identify Chinese illegal migrants, he said.

“We have been stepping up our engagement with the Chinese authorities to tackle this problem together,?he added.

British police have arrested at least seven people on suspicion of manslaughter over the drownings. Their investigation could become a global inquiry into Chinese people-traffickers ?known as “snakeheads??suspected of providing the labourers killed at in the tragedy. Local police reported that the dead were all illegal immigrants, the youngest a 15-year-old girl. One of the survivors was a female student.

The longest any of the group had been in England was six months, China’s deputy consul general in Manchester, Wu Yangyu, was quoted as saying.

Gang labour

Five men and two women have now been arrested over last week’s deaths of the low-wage workers, who were caught by fast-rising tides as they collected cockles in Morecambe Bay, Northwest England.

At least five of the seven were being held by Lancashire Police on suspicion of manslaughter. A police spokeswoman said the two men arrested on Monday came voluntarily into custody and were not among the tragedy’s survivors, as the other five were.

“They are being questioned about involvement they may have had in organizing the cockling trip that led to the tragedy,?a Lancashire police spokesman said.

The deaths of the 17 men and two women have focused attention on gang labour, where so-called gangmasters farm out migrant labourers, often illegally, to do poorly paid jobs in agriculture and unskilled industrial work like construction.

A British MP on Monday tabled a “Gangmaster Licensing Bill?as a way to control the largely unregulated business.

“What’s happening in Britain is nothing more than modern-day slavery,?Labour MP Jim Sheridan said. “It is unacceptable in modern Britain to have people working for something like 1 pound (US$1.85) a day.? Detectives seized computers, cell phones and other documents in house raids over the weekend in the Merseyside area of Northwest England near where the deaths occurred.

Lancashire police Deputy Chief Constable Steve Finnigan said the inquiry would be “truly massive?

Human smuggling from China hit world headlines in June 2000 when 58 Chinese illegal immigrants from the southern province of Fujian were found suffocated to death in a tomato truck arriving at the British port of Dover from the Netherlands.

A freighter carrying 300 illegal Chinese immigrants ran aground off New York in June 1993. Ten people drowned while trying to swim ashore.

(Agencies via Xinhua)