US-led soldiers traffic Afghan drugs

US-led soldiers in Afghanistan are reportedly engaged in smuggling heroin and other drugs out of the country, a British newspaper says.

According to a report published in British newspaper The Sunday Times, British soldiers at Camp Bastion in Helmand province and Canadian soldiers based at Kandahar airport may have been involved in trafficking drugs.

Camp Bastion and Kandahar airport are the two main airports carrying soldiers in and out of Afghanistan.

The British government said it was looking into claims that the soldiers may have smuggled heroin out of the war-torn country.

“Although they are unsubstantiated, we take any such reports very seriously and we have already tightened our existing procedures both in Afghanistan and in the UK, including through increasing the use of trained sniffer dogs,” a British Ministry of Defense spokeswoman told the newspaper.

“We regret any inconvenience this causes to our service personnel. Any of our people found to be engaged in trafficking of illegal narcotics will feel the full weight of the law,” she further added.

However, the Canadian Department of National Defense (DND) denied these accusations as false allegations.

“We’ve conferred with the Royal Military Police as well as our Canadian Forces military police contingent in Kandahar,” DND spokeswoman Jenn Gearey told The Toronto Star newspaper on Monday morning.

“If we feel an investigation is warranted, we’ll launch one,” he added.

The claims are particularly embarrassing for the British military, considering their previous involvement in efforts to eradicate poppy crop, Press TV’s correspondent in London said on Monday.

Back in 2001, the opium production –from which heroin is derived –was at an all time low, but following the US invasion of the country, the poppy fields returned and production outstripped previous levels.

An anonymous Afghan drug dealer told Press TV that military personnel are the second largest buyers after foreign drug lords and said that they [military personnel] tend to place orders before they return home to the US or the UK.

Last week the British Ministry of Defense said coalition forces seized over one billion dollars worth of heroin in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is reportedly the source of ninety percent of the world’s heroin.