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Seminar on drug sting operations opens in Minsk

A three-say seminar on sting operations targeting drug traffickers opened in Minsk on Tuesday.

he event had been organized under a BUMAD program of the European Commission and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) aimed at combating illicit drug trafficking in Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine.

Alyaksandr Hawrylaw, chief of the Belarusian interior ministry's department for the prevention of drugs and human trafficking, told reporters that Belarusian police together with foreign colleagues smashed several drug trafficking rings in sting operations.

Belarus' police smashed in cooperation with Russian and German law-enforcers one ring of Belarusian nationals who supplied cocaine from Venezuela to Russia, and dismantled together with Lithuanian law-enforcers a group of Lithuanian nationals that trafficked hashish and marijuana from Lithuania to Russia via Belarus. Some 500 grams of cocaine and four kilograms of hashish and marihuana were seized.

Alyaksandr Shchurko, first deputy interior minister, said at the seminar that an international drug trafficking ring that smuggled heroin via Belarus to the European Union had recently been caught. Among its members were nationals of Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Germany and Kazakhstan. Ten kilograms of heroine and 16 kilograms of opium material were seized. //BelaPAN