Half a Ton of Narcotics Seized in Iran's Southeastern Province
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Police forces in Iranian southeastern Kerman province’s Anbarabad town seized 500 kilograms of narcotic drugs from traffickers in a single operation.
A drug-trafficking band was identified and dismantled in and operation launched by Anbarabad police forces in cooperation with Kerman province anti-narcotic police squads, said the town's law fnforcement chief, Colonel Mohammad Bidashki in a press conference.
The police chief also informed the press that two smugglers were arrested and two of their vehicles were confiscated in the operation.
Colonel Bidashki meanwhile noted that this was the second 500-kg drug cargo seized this month in Anbarabad by the town’s police forces.
In recent decades Iran has been hit by drug trafficking, mainly because of its 936- kilometer shared border with Afghanistan, which supplies over 90% of the world's opium, the raw ingredient of heroin.
Iran which shares a long border with the world's opium warehouse, Afghanistan, seizes huge amounts of illicit drugs every year, deputy head of Iran's Anti-Narcotics Headquarters said some days ago.
“No country in the world discovers as much illicit drugs as Iran does,” Taha Taheri said, noting that on average the Islamic Republic discovers about 500 tons of narcotics every year.
The United Nations has estimated in the past that opium trafficking accounts for up 15 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, but the figure is expected to rise as international military and development spending declines with the NATO withdrawal at the end of 2014.
Iran is on a major transit route for drugs being smuggled from Afghanistan to Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and the country's war on drug-traffickers has claimed the lives of nearly 4,000 Iranian police forces over the past 34 years.
According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Iran is netting eight times more opium and three times more heroin than all other countries in the world combined.
