Pakistan destroys heroin-refining labs in big raid

QUETTA, Pakistan, June 11 (Reuters) Pakistan's anti-narcotics force has launched a huge raid near the Afghan border, destroying heroin-manufacturing facilities and seizing drugs and weapons, an official said today.

Backed by helicopters and small planes, Saturday's raid followed a tip that gangs had set up a heroin-manufacturing centre in Chaghi area in Baluchistan province after they were chased out by authorities in neighbouring Afghanistan.

''It was the biggest operation recently,'' Brigadier Anwarul Haq, a regional director of the anti-drugs agency, told reporters in Baluchistan's capital Quetta. ''Eight mobile heroin-refining laboratories have been destroyed.'' He said 2025 kg of morphine, 10 kg (22 lb) of heroin and rifles, rockets and hand grenades were seized.

No arrests were made. Haq said the suspects had managed to cross back into Afghanistan's Helmand province.

Afghan Special Narcotics Forces in April mounted raids in Helmand, the country's main opium-growing region, where authorities say militants and the drug gangs are in league.

Pakistan was declared free of opium poppies in 2000, but production reappeared two years later. Authorities have warned that it is in danger of becoming a major production and refining centre for heroin and morphine, the derivatives of opium gum found in the poppy flower's bulb.

Pakistani officials say about 70 per cent of Afghanistan's drugs are smuggled through Pakistan and Iran, while the rest goes north through Central Asia.

REUTERS CH BD1847