Media report: Iran to seal off Pakistan borders within 3 years

Iran to seal eastern borders to prevent drug smuggling and infiltration of armed groups.

TEHRAN:

Iran will completely seal off its eastern borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan by 2015 to prevent drug smuggling and infiltration of armed groups, media quoted the police chief on Saturday as saying.

“About 90 per cent of Iran’s eastern borders have already been sealed,” Iranian newspaper Arman quoted Iranian General Esmaeil Ahmadi Moghaddam as saying.

“The remaining 10 per cent, in the region of Saravan [near the southeastern border with Pakistan] will be closed within three years,” he said. “The border will be sealed even to pedestrians.”

In early 1990, Iran began to build a “wall” to seal its approximately 1,800 kilometre-long border with its neighbours to control drug trafficking and infiltration of armed rebel groups or bandits.

The border “wall”, which sometimes consists simply of fencing and barbed wire, is strengthened by a thousand kilometres of embankments, ditches, canals or cement walls.

According to official figures, some 3,700 members of Iran’s security forces have been killed in a three-decade long battle with drug traffickers and armed groups.

Ahmadi Moghaddam said over 12 months till March this year, Tehran seized some 420 tonnes of drugs, or nearly 80 per cent of the opium and 40 per cent of heroin seized in the world, according to official figures confirmed by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in Tehran.







Published in The Express Tribune, July 3^rd, 2011.