NEWS CREW AMBUSHED BY DRUG BANDITS

A television crew from American news giant CNN today found itself under a
hail of gunfire from drug growers in the heart of Lebanon's marijuana
plantations, CNN bureau chief in Beirut Brent Sadler said.

The British Sadler and his team of German cameraman Christian Streib,
Lebanese producer Nada Husseini and their driver were escorted by the owner
of a cannabis plantation and his agricultural engineer in the eastern Bekaa
valley, the hub of the country's drug trade.

Suddenly they stumbled into an ambush.

"We were filming in the valley 20 kilometres north of Hermel where
thousands of hectares of cannabis crop are cultivated when several warning
shots were fired when we were leaving," said Sadler, who has been posted in
Lebanon four years.

"Several minutes later we were ambushed on a remote mountain road by about
10 gunmen in two cars, armed with assault rifles, pistols and I saw a
sniper rifle. They pointed the gun at the driver and fired one shot. No one
was shot," he said.

"The other gunmen went running down the slope, firing their guns into the
air and at the ground.

"They forced the CNN crew out of their car at gunpoint and fired dozens of
shots at random during the incident," he recalled.

They confiscated all CNN's film equipment, including two cameras, but
allowed the crew to keep their personal items.

Sadler said, "They were happy to return in one piece" from this "dangerous
lawless part of Lebanon" where a "very heavily armed group of men (are)
operating in an area of concentrated cannabis crop production".

Lebanese security services estimate that cannabis in the Bekaa valley is
now planted on 35,000 hectares, which could spread to 50,000 hectares by
harvest time this year.

Nonetheless, drug experts say the current drug crop is at one-tenth of the
levels reached in 1990, the final year of Lebanon's 15-year civil war.

The Lebanese government launched a crackdown on the drug trade in 1992 and
received foreign aid from the United Nations for a crop substitution program.

Unfortunately, Lebanon never attracted the financial aid it hoped for to
stamp out the drug trade permanently.

Sadler estimates Lebanon will make $US135 million ($A259 million) this year
from its cannabis trade, adding the crop's "street value ... in Europe is
$US2 billion ($A3.85 billion)".