Hashish smugglers take Saharan route to Europe

NIAMEY, July 19 (Reuters) Morocco's efforts to halt its cannabis trade are pushing drug trafficking networks deeper into the Sahara as they smuggle hashish to lucrative European markets, diplomats and security officials say.

The North African state is the world's leading supplier of cannabis resin and the main source of hashish trafficked into Europe, but as controls on the traditional route via Spain are tightened its neighbours appear to be taking up the slack.

Niger, an impoverished former French colony on the southern edge of the Sahara, has made record seizures in the past 12 months and this year had captured almost twice as much cannabis resin by April as in the whole of 2006.

''The seizures this year are worrying,'' said Karidio Daouda Idrissa, president of Niger's National Commission for the Fight Against Drugs (CNCLD).

''In the past 12 months the Niger army has seized 5,705 kg of cannabis resin in the desert ... We have never seized such a significant tonnage in this country,'' he told Reuters.

The traffickers had brand new Toyota jeeps, sophisticated weapons and communications equipment, a level of organisation that suggested the actual volume of drugs was much higher.

''According to the information available, the drug traffickers intercepted in 2006 and 2007 were equipped with rocket-propelled grenades, AK 47s and hand grenades,'' said Antonio Mazzitelli, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in West Africa, after a recent visit to Niger.

''The heavy armament is probably justified by the need to protect the convoy all through the long journey across the desert, as well as by the value of the shipment,'' he said.

FUNDING REBEL GROUPS The trade is probably helping funding rebel groups around the Sahara including Islamist militants, but the relationship is one of convenience rather than ideology, security analysts say.

Northern Niger and neighbouring Mali are awash with arms after revolts in the 1990s by light-skinned Tuareg nomads demanding greater autonomy from black African-led governments.

Most rebel groups made peace a decade ago but the Tuareg-led Niger Movement for Justice (MNJ) launched a new campaign in February, and has killed 33 soldiers and taken dozens hostage.

The MNJ has made political demands including a greater share of revenues from uranium mining and more local autonomy, but the government dismisses them as drug traffickers and common bandits.

An internal Algerian police report cited in the local press in May said al Qaeda's North African wing, which is believed to operate in the border areas between Algeria, Mali and Niger, was using drug smuggling to buy weapons.

That movement, which grew out of Algeria's Islamist insurgency in the early 1990s and recently renamed itself al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, was responsible for a triple suicide bombing in Algiers in April which killed 33 people.

Morocco is under pressure from the European Union, the main market for its hashish, to stamp out the trade and border officials have stepped up security in the Strait of Gibraltar.

But smugglers also follow ancient caravan routes north across the Sahara to Mediterranean seaboard countries like Algeria, from where drugs can be shipped relatively easily into Europe.

Niger's government has urged its neighbours to try to cut off fuel and munitions supplies to the rebels on its territory and plans to host an international conference with the United Nations in October to discuss combating smuggling in the Sahara.

''All these countries have the same problem ... from Mauritania, northern Mali, southern Algeria, northern Niger, northern Chad, right across to Sudan,'' Niger's Communication Minister Mohamed Ben Omar said.

''It is a highly profitable trade. These are people who have built up vast sums of money. And they don't want states taking control of their zone.'' REUTERS PD VV1015