Iran calls for aid against drug-trafficking

Senior officials in Iran have called for more aid from Europe to help combat drug-trafficking from neighbouring Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The head of the parliament's national security committee, Mohsen Mirdamadi, said the security forces were struggling to cope with the scale of the problem.

The Interior Minister Abdol-Vahed Mussavi-Lari told MPs that in the past six months alone, more than three hundred and fifty Afghan drug traffickers have been killed and four thousand arrested.

Iran has accused the Taleban authorities in Afghanistan of being behind the region's drugs trade -- a charge they deny. A senior Taleban spokesman Abdul Hai Muttma'in told the BBC that he acknowledged there was a difficult situation in the border area with Iran but said the Taleban had stepped up operations against the drug traffickers.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service