FOCUS-INTERNATIONAL HEROIN RING SMASHED - CANADA

VANCOUVER (Reuters) - Police have broken up a major Asian drug organization
that allegedly smuggled in so much heroin it could manipulate prices across
North America at will, Canadian authorities said Wednesday.

The operation moved millions of dollars of heroin annually from Southeast
Asia through Vancouver to markets in the United States as far away as Puerto
Rico, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

"When you start dealing with heroin at the multi-multikilogram level, you
are dealing with the top echelon of heroin movement throughout the world,"
RCMP Sgt. Patrick Convey said.

Twenty-eight people were arrested in raids in Canada, the United States,
Hong Kong and Thailand after a nearly three-year-long investigation that
began in Canada, authorities said.

The drug group had ties with Hong Kong-based crime organizations allegedly
involved in other activities in Asia and the Vancouver area, including
international credit card fraud, authorities said.

They seized 80 heroin units, each weighing 1.5 pounds , during a series of
raids in Vancouver, New York and Puerto Rico but believe the organization
handled "several hundred units" a year.

Most of the heroin, from Burma and China, was smuggled into North America in
containers that arrived in the port of Vancouver, they said. It was
occasionally stockpiled in Canada to limit North America supplies and drive
up prices, they said.

"That was the endeavor, to wait for the price to go up and then flood the
street with more," Convey said.

Mounties said the investigation appeared to support complaints by police in
Canada and the United States that Vancouver had become a favorite
operational base for international drug smugglers.

"It looks like at this point in time Vancouver is the major point of entry
of heroin from Southeast Asia," Convey said. He said smugglers liked to work
from Canada because its drug laws carried lesser penalties than those in the
United States.

Authorities said most of the money raised by the group was smuggled back to
Asia, and they will investigate if any banks in Hong Kong or other major
Asian financial centers were involved in laundering the money.

Canadian officials said they were forced to move against the organization at
this time because the FBI had recently arrested members of the drug group in
New York and Canada was worried the smugglers would be tipped off to the
larger probe.