Guinea-Bissau sacks policeman who fought drug trade

BISSAU, June 11 (Reuters) Guinea-Bissau's government has sacked a police chief who took a lead fighting South American drug cartels that have made the tiny, dirt-poor West African country a major hub for cocaine trafficking to Europe.

Criminal gangs use the former Portuguese colony's network of coastal islands, creeks and airstrips to smuggle hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of cocaine into Europe.

President Joao Bernardo Vieira's government decided at a cabinet meeting on Saturday to sack Judicial Police Chief Orlando Antonio Da Silva and his investigations director, a government statement said late on Saturday. It gave no reason.

Under Da Silva the judicial police, whose role includes fighting crimes like drug smuggling, have made several high-profile drugs seizures in the past year, and police detained nearly 100 suspects in a dawn raid on May 30.

But efforts to combat drug-running have been hamstrung by lack of money and equipment, official incompetence and corruption.

Last September Da Silva proudly announced the country's biggest ever drugs seizure: 674 kg of cocaine valued at 25 million dollar, seized by police after a tip-off from international police agency Interpol.

But less than a month later a judge set free the two Colombian suspects without explanation and the cocaine itself vanished from a state Treasury vault.

COMPLICITY An inter-ministerial commission on drug smuggling has been investigating that case and was due to submit a report by last Friday, but failed to do so.

Interior Minister Baciro Dabo has said the commission, which has questioned two former ministers, was established because of the complicity of senior state authorities in drug trafficking.

In its statement on Saturday the government called on the justice minister to draw up a plan to fight drug trafficking and to submit the commission report into the disappearance of drugs as soon as possible.

The United Nations envoy to Bissau, Shola Omoregie, said on Thursday the international community had one last chance to save the country from chaos and shore up new Prime Minister Martinho Ndafa Kabi's reform programme by committing 20 million dollar in aid to meet a budgetary shortfall.

Allegations of top officials' collusion in drug trafficking contributed to the previous government's fall in March.

''The government is committed to fighting drugs successfully, because they are causing so much harm to the country and society,'' Kabi's government said in Saturday's statement.

Most of the cocaine smuggled into Guinea-Bissau on board ships or fishing boats is dispatched to Europe or elsewhere via criminal networks criss-crossing West Africa, but some finds its way onto the local market.

A drug addiction treatment centre at Quinhamel, 40 km north of the capital Bissau, now receives 40 admissions a month, up from just five a couple of years ago, according to Father Domingos, the Roman Catholic priest who runs the centre.

REUTERS SRS PM0535