MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Police Chief of Argentine Province Sacked

Authorities sacked the police chief for Buenos Aires province on Thursday, days after plans were announced to send more than 2.000 national guardsmen onto the streets to curtail a crime wave.

Police Commissioner Alberto Sobrado was removed in a shake-up of the police force that patrols the vast province, home to almost a quarter of the country's 36 million population, authorities announced. He had led a 40,000-member police force. No immediate replacement was named.

Sobrado's ouster appeared to be the latest attempt to combat rising lawlessness in the region, which includes the suburbs of the Argentine capital. The province has been plagued in recent years with kidnappings, killings and carjacking.

Security Ministry sources said that Cafiero's decision is also linked to reports indicating Sobrado holds an undeclared 350,000-dollar bank account in the Bahamas. The information was published yesterday by weekly magazine Veintitrés.

President Nestor Kirchner, his popularity soaring over promises to tackle both crime and a badly ailing economy, has already shaken up the federal police force. His security chief recently announced a plan to order 2.000 guardsmen ? or gendarmes ? onto the province's streets.

Home to 8 million people, the gritty provincial rustbelt is dotted with idled factories, shantytowns and decaying urban communities blighted by the crime wave that kicked in with a deep recession in 1998.

The additional guardsmen are to join some 900 others already sent out in recent months to counter brazen daylight robberies, the killings of dozens of police officers and numerous ransom kidnappings.