U.N. hails Iran for curbing flow of Afghan heroin

Afghan men harvest opium in a poppy field in a village in the Golestan district of Farah province in this May 5, 2009 file photo.

VIENNA (Reuters) - The head of the U.N. crime agency praised Iran during a visit on Wednesday for curbing the flow of smuggled heroin from Afghanistan and helping keep the drug off Western streets.

Iran, which shares a 900-km (560-mile) border with Afghanistan, is a conduit for smuggling drugs to the West from its insurgency-ridden neighbour. Up to 2 million people are estimated to use narcotics among Iran's population of 70 million.

Visiting Iran's border zone, Antonio Maria Costa, director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC), hailed Iran's "massive sacrifice ... in holding back a flood of heroin" from Afghanistan, the agency said in a statement issued in Vienna.

"The more drugs that are seized near production areas, the less drugs will reach Western streets," Costa said after a meeting with Iranian police chief Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam.

More than 3,700 Iranian security personnel have been killed fighting drug smugglers since Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution and Costa said Iranian anti-drugs police were among the world's best.

Iran said last month that, in the year to March 20, it had seized about one-third of the estimated 3,000 tonnes of drugs smuggled into the Islamic Republic from Afghanistan.

In the 1990s, Iran began to build physical barriers to make it more difficult to slip narcotics into the country and is now adding hundreds of kilometres to link the different sections.

At a U.N. meeting in The Hague in March, Iran offered to help Afghanistan in combating drugs, in a gesture to a U.S. call for regional support in Afghanistan that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described as promising.

The United States and Iran have had no diplomatic ties for three decades and are at odds over Tehran's nuclear plans. Analysts say they share an interest in ensuring a stable Afghanistan and an end to opium and heroin production there.

Costa commended Iranian, Afghan and Pakistani police forces for carrying out their first joint anti-drug swoop along their common borders in March as part of a UNODC-brokered initiative.