CANADIAN POLICE SMASH ASIAN DRUG GANG

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Police say they have
arrested two Chinese nationals alleged to be members of an
international organized crime group involved in drug trafficking in
North America.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced today the arrest of 30-
year-old Chi Hang Chan and 35-year-old Kwok Yung Chan on charges of
possession of heroin, and conspiracy to traffick in heroin. The two
men are brothers-in-law.

RCMP spokeswoman Sarah Jones says they are members of a transnational
Asian-based gang that allegedly directed international money
laundering operations worth millions of dollars.

The arrests came after a 13-month investigation in British Columbia,
Ontario and Hong Kong, and at one point about 100 officers in several
countries were involved in the probe.

Jones says, ``The evidence collected in this case highlights the
degree to which Vancouver has become an international center for drug
trafficking.''

She says Chi Hang Chan was picked up on Dec. 7 in Vancouver, British
Columbia, after he had boarded a bus headed for Seattle, Wash., using
the alias Shu Shing Lee.

Kwok Yung Chan was arrested in Toronto on Monday, and both suspects
are awaiting deportation from Canada. The two men are alleged to have
used falsified travel documents.

Inspector Terry Towns, who heads the RCMP's Greater Vancouver Drug
Section, says the case ``illustrates what we have been saying for a
long time.''

He says, ``Highly-sophisticated and well-connected organized crime
groups, with the capacity to move freely from one country to the next,
are using Canada, and particularly Vancouver, as a primary center for
warehousing and global transhipment of huge quantities of drugs.''

Towns says, ``To successfully address this problem we are having to
conduct extremely expensive, labor-intensive and complex multi-
jurisdictional investigations in partnership with law-enforcement
agencies from around the world.''

The RCMP says that by warehousing high-grade heroin in Canada, Asian-
based gangs have been able to artificially raise the price of the
drugs in North America, making huge profits ``by alternately flooding
and shorting the heroin market as they see fit.''

During the investigations, police seized devices used to press heroin
into blocks.