Chinese police should stop using torture to extract confessions, a top justice official has said, the South China Morning Post reported. "Nearly every wrongful verdict in recent years relates to illegal interrogation," Wang Zhenchuan, a deputy-procurator-general of the Supreme People's Procuratorate, told a seminar in Sanya, Hainan province, at the weekend. He said that at least 30 cases a year returned wrongful verdicts due to confessions extracted by torture and coercion but admitted the real figure could be higher. Rights experts have said that electric batons, cigarette burns, submersion in water or sewage and exposure to extreme heat or cold have all been employed in China. Last year, China denied claims by the UN special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, that torture was still widely practiced in the country.