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Tajik arrested in Russia's Urals city with 14 kg of heroin

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MOSCOW, September 17 (RIA Novosti) - A citizen of Tajikistan has been arrested in a Russian city in the Urals with 13.6 kilograms of heroin and over a kilogram of opium, a police source said Sunday.

"Members of the anti-organized crime police department have detained a Tajik national in a rented house in Chelyabinsk," the source said.

Police are trying to identify the source of the drugs.

Citizens of Tajikistan and other post Soviet Central Asian states have been frequently arrested in Russia's Siberian, Urals and other regions with major batches of illicit drugs.

In mid-August, Russian Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev met with his colleagues in Tajikistan, which borders on Afghanistan, the world's leading supplier of illegal drugs, to discuss the problem.

Nurgaliyev said the country was on the "northern" route leading to Western Europe through Russia and was "on the forefront" of the fight against drug trafficking.

Since the collapse of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 2001, the international community has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on efforts to destroy poppy crops, close drug labs, pay subsidies to impoverished farmers and encourage them to cultivate alternate crops.

Although Russia withdrew its border guard units from Tajikistan in 2005, handing control over the volatile frontier with Afghanistan to Tajik guards, it has maintained an advisory role and continued to offer assistance. Russia also has a military base in Tajikistan with several thousand personnel.

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