LONDON, Sept. 14 (UPI) -- British and Canadian officials denounced as speculation a British media report that troops from both nations are involved in drug smuggling from Afghanistan.
The Sunday Times from London published an article claiming that an investigation into whether British and Canadian troops are smuggling heroin out of Afghanistan on military planes ferrying troops back home.
A spokesman for Canada's Defense Ministry said Monday it wouldn't investigate the report after a thorough check through the chain of command revealed no evidence to back up the allegations, CBC News reports.
"The Canadian Forces Military Police have confirmed with Britain's Royal Military Police that no such investigation is under way and that no such allegations have been made against either British or Canadian personnel," Col. Tim Grubb, Canadian Forces provost marshal, said in a statement. "The Canadian Forces take all allegations against their personnel seriously and investigate where warranted."
Britain's Ministry of Defense on Sunday called the report "unsubstantiated," but added that it takes such allegations "very seriously and we have already tightened our existing procedures both in Afghanistan and in the U.K., including through increasing the use of trained sniffer dogs."
The ministry added it regrets "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."
The Sunday Times said in the article that the allegations concern troops at Camp Bastion and Kandahar, two airports used by NATO forces to fly soldiers in and out of Afghanistan.
Authorities have significantly boosted drug searches of British personnel returning from Afghanistan at the Brize Norton air base northwest of London.
The inquiry was launched after a whistle-blower tipped detectives from the Defense Ministry special investigation branch that a network of British soldiers was buying drugs from dealers and smuggling them to Britain to resell them, the newspaper writes.
It quotes from a 1-year-old interview with an Afghan drug dealer, who told the newspaper that most of his customers, apart from drug lords in foreign countries, are troops.
"The soldiers whose term of duty is about to finish, they give an order to our boss. So most of the foreigners who do these deals are the military. They buy a lot from us," he said.
Around 90 percent of the world's opium, the raw material for heroin, is cultivated in Afghanistan and is the country's largest industrial sector.
There are estimates that the Taliban finance their military activities against the West with around $300 million per year from the drug trade.
Poor farmers in the south of Afghanistan are paid by drug lords or the Taliban to cultivate opium poppies. The opium paste from the plants is transformed into heroin in laboratories all over the country, from where it is smuggled into Russia through Central Asia or Iran, Turkey and the Balkans into the European Union. From there, it reaches the United States and Canada.
