BEIJING -- Chinese prosecutors investigated 24 provincial, ministerial or higher level officials in the first 11 months of 2014, an official with the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) said Thursday.

Xu Jinhui, the SPP's anti-bribery head, said that prosecutors across the country investigated 30,414 cases involving 39,533 people on suspicion of bribery between January and November 2014. Of them, 3,077 officials were at the county level or higher, up 36.3 percent.

The number of cases was 11.7 percent higher than the same period the year before while the number of people under investigation was 7.1 percent higher.

Prosecutorial agencies had 611 fugitives repatriated from overseas in the first 11 months of 2014.

A total of 7,449 people were put under investigation for offering bribes in the same period, an increase of 37.9 percent, he said.