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Drug police seize 200 kilos of heroin in Moscow region

FSKN agents have been working on the ethnic Tajik group for about a year

MOSCOW, August 23 (Itar-Tass) — Drug police stopped a large drug trafficking channel to the Moscow region, seizing over 200 kilograms of heroin in an operation, head of the regional department of the Federal Service for Drug Control and Psychotropic Substances Circulation /FSKN/ Vasily Yurchenko told reporters on Thursday.

FSKN agents have been working on the ethnic Tajik group for about a year. Over this period, 12 criminal cases against members of this criminal group have been opened.

"Overnight to August 22, FSKN agents detained three group masterminds on a Moscow-Dushanbe train in Bronnitsy. More than 200 kilograms of heroin were seized from them," Yurchenko said...

Two suspects with illegal cargo were detained in a forest. The third managed to escape, but police detained him in a village nearby shortly thereafter.

The eldest of the drug traffickers is just 21 years old. The narcotic was packed in plastic bottles of various sizes. The heroin was collected near railway stations of the Moscow-Kazan railway from their accomplices - passenger car attendants - and was later sold to local drug dealers. The suspected train attendants have been arrested.

"The train is now on its way to Dushanbe. We know the identity of those persons; we're now facing painstaking work at the international level," Yurchenko noted.

He underlined that the confiscated narcotic was high-grade. The content of heroin in the drugs sold in the black market reaches some 8 percent, so the police had actually seized some two tons of "street heroin," whose wholesale price amounts to two million dollars, according to the FSKN official.

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