YEREVAN, DECEMBER 15, NOYAN TAPAN. The number of crimes grew by 7.4% in Armenia in the first 11 months of 2008: 8,192 crimes were recorded in the indicated period. The number of grave crimes grew by 15.3%, that of especially grave crimes - by 6.9%, the head of the Main Criminal Search Department of the RA Police Hovhannes Tamamian announced at the December 12 press conference. According to him, in the total number of crimes against man, a growth was recorded in murders, attempted murders, infliction of heavy damage to health, rapes and attempted rapes. The number of crimes against property increased by 11.8%, including a growth in burglaries (12.6%), robber attacks (76.1%), and robberies (78.2%). In the total number of crimes against property, there was a decline in the number of frauds (by 10% or 37 cases) and crimes committed with the use of fire-arms (16.3%), while the number of autothefts increased by 70 cases. In the 11 months of 2008, 665 units of fire-arms were either seized by the police or handed over voluntarily by citizens, which, according to H. Tamamian, is the highest index since 1993. The police representative said that the growth in the number of crimes is mostly conditioned by the activation of supervisory work done by the police heads with respect to territorial sub-units, especially the registration carried out by these sub-units in recent period. A fall in the crime detection indices was recorded in parallel with the growth of recorded crimes.

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