LYON, France, July 10: Police across Asia have arrested more than 1,300 people and seized $16 million dollars in a major swoop on illegal football gambling networks, Interpol said on Thursday.

In May and June, police raided 1,088 illegal gambling dens across the region, many controlled by organised crime gangs, according to a statement issued at Interpol headquarters in Lyon, southeastern France.

Located across China, including in Hong Kong and Macao, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, the dens are jointly estimated to have handled some 1.5 billion dollars of bets, it said.

Codenamed Operation SOGA II — short for soccer gambling — the crackdown was timed to coincide with the Euro 2008 football championships and the finals of other football league matches around the world, Interpol said.

The operation has achieved is substantial result, the international police agency’s director of police services, Jean-Michel Louboutin, said in the statement.

Louboutin added that the operation, the second of its kind, “forms an excellent base for collective security efforts during the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics,” which kick off on Aug 8.—Reuters