Man jailed over China porn haul

The DVDs were found in raids on four warehouses

A Chinese court has sentenced a man to 19 years in prison for trafficking millions of pornographic DVDs, China's official Xinhua news agency reported.

The man, identified only by his surname Chen, was sentenced with 12 others in the southern city of Guangzhou.

They were arrested after police seized more than 6.23 million pirated DVDS - 4.4 million of them pornographic - in a series of raids last March .

It was the biggest such case ever prosecuted in China, Xinhua said.

The haul was said to account for a third of all DVDs seized between 1994 and 2002.

The group was said to have smuggled more than 11 million pornographic and "erotic" DVDs into China between August 2001 and March 2003.

The group allegedly made profits of more than 3.5m Yuan ($423,000) from the sale of the smuggled DVDs.

Details of the other sentences were not given.

The Chinese government began an anti-porn campaign earlier this year, when hundreds of people were arrested and hundreds of websites shut down.