Afghan forces seize opium

2005-05-31 21:52

Kabul - Afghan security forces seized 2 tons of opium in a raid on the country's biggest drugs market on the border with Pakistan, but hundreds of smugglers who were there escaped across the frontier, said officials on Tuesday.

General Mohammed Daoud, deputy interior minister for counternarcotics said, about 250kg of heroin and 3.5 tons of chemicals used to process opium into heroin were also seized in the raid on Saturday on the "drugs bazaar" in Bahram Shah village in southern Helmand province.

The ministry of interior said the market was used by up to 1 000 traffickers of opium and heroin everyday and was on smuggling routes to Pakistan and Iran.

It said the bazaar had not been targeted before because it was considered too remote and too well protected.

'All smugglers fled'

Daoud said in Kabul, the market was only 80m from the border with Pakistan and all the smugglers fled as security forces raided it. No one was arrested.

When asked if the government had asked for co-operation from Pakistani security forces to arrest the smugglers, he said a framework for such requests was still being hammered out between Kabul and Islamabad.

Daoud said the raid highlighted the government's resolve in cracking down on the drugs trade, after President Hamid Karzai's administration came under fire for its record in fighting the burgeoning narcotics industry.

Officers hide their identities

He showed a video of the raid by members of the new and secretive Afghan special narcotics force.

Dozens of officers, with guns at the ready and scarfs wrapped around their faces to hide their identities, drove into the desert town.

The deputy minister said, but, there was no fighting because all the smugglers had fled and the video then cut to a shot of a small fire, which was the seized drugs being destroyed.

Afghanistan last year produced nearly 90% of the world's opium, sparking warnings it was fast becoming a dangerous "narco-state" less than four years after the US-led invasion ended its role as a haven for al-Qaeda.

Trafficking of drugs

Counternarcotics Minister Habibullah Qaderi said: "The government of Afghanistan is determined to remove the shame of drugs and to take action against those involved in the processing and trafficking of drugs."

The government said figures for the past three years - since US-led forces ousted the Taliban - showed police were now confiscating larger amounts of opium, from 3 tons in 2002 to more than 135 tons in 2004 and 50 tons so far this year.

The US, Britain and other countries were pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into an anti-drug campaign.

The cash was being used to train police units to destroy laboratories, arrest smugglers and destroy opium crops, as well as to fund projects to help farmers grow legal crops.

- AP