TEHRAN, July 2: Iran would completely seal off its eastern borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan by 2015 to prevent drug smuggling and infiltration of armed groups, a senior police official was quoted as saying by media on Saturday.

“About 90 per cent of Iran’s eastern borders have already been sealed,” Arman newspaper quoted General Esmaeil Ahmadi Moghaddam as saying. “The remaining 10 per cent, in the region of Saravan (near the south-eastern border with Pakistan) will be closed within three years,” he said. “The border will be sealed even to pedestrians.”

In early 1990, Iran began to build a ‘wall’ to seal its approximately 1,800-kilometre-long border with its neighbours to control drug trafficking and infiltration of armed groups or bandits.

The border ‘wall’, which sometimes consists simply of fencing and barbed wire, is strengthened by a thousand kilometres of embankments, ditches, canals or cement walls.

According to official figures, some 3,700 members of Iran’s security forces have been killed in a three-decade-long battle with drug traffickers and armed groups, often equipped with heavy weapons in the restive eastern provinces.

Nonetheless, the country is still a main corridor for drug traffickers who smuggle narcotics from Afghanistan — which the United Nations says produces 90 per cent of the world’s opium -— to the Middle East and Europe.—AFP