Major drug raid in Afghanistan a bust

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - With scarves hiding some faces and guns at the ready, a new secretive Afghan anti-drug squad zoomed into a desert village as part of a crackdown on the country's booming narcotics trade, authorities said Tuesday.

They seized more than two tonnes opium and 250 kilograms of heroin but hundreds of smugglers sneaked out the back and fled to safety across the Pakistani border just 80 metres away. No one was arrested.

Under fire for not being tough enough on drugs, the Afghan government showed a video Tuesday of the weekend raid which it said proves it is cracking down on an industry that last year produced nearly 90 per cent of the world's opium.

The market in Bahram Shah village in southern Helmand province is used by up to 1,000 drug-traffickers every day and is on smuggling routes to Pakistan and Iran. It had not been targeted before because it was considered too remote and too well protected, the Interior Ministry said.

But the latest raid by dozens of squad members "totally disrupted the activities of drug-traffickers," the ministry said in a statement.

"We are determined to bring to justice the drug-smugglers and you will soon witness that all smugglers will be brought to justice," Gen. Mohammed Daoud, deputy interior minister for counter-narcotics, said at a news conference in the capital Kabul.

When asked why the anti-drug forces didn't manage to arrest any of the traffickers, he noted the proximity of the Pakistani border and said a framework for co-operation between security forces on both sides of the frontier is still being finalized.

The video shows members of the Afghan Special Narcotics Force riding across the desert on the back of pickup trucks toward the drug market. It then cuts to a shot of a small fire, which the deputy minister said depicted the seized drugs being destroyed.>>>continued

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