Iran, Afghanistan agree to prisoner swap

TEHRAN, April 28 (MNA) – Iran and Afghanistan have agreed to a prisoner exchange, the Foreign Ministry in Kabul said on Thursday. “Signed on Tuesday by Iranian President (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) it is effective immediately,” Janan Mosazai, a foreign ministry spokesman, told Reuters, adding that 3,000 Afghans are held in Iranian prisons. It was unclear how many Iranian prisoners are in Afghan prisons, Mosazai said. The two neighbors first drew up rules defining the terms of such exchanges in 2006, allowing prisoners or their families to choose whether to be incarcerated in Iran or Afghanistan. The Foreign Ministry praised the move by Iran as “a strengthening in bilateral relations” - but it said in a statement that the agreement applied only to prisoners who had at least six months to run on their jail terms. Economic hardship and insecurity have led many Afghans to cross the country border to its west, and Iran is host to more than one million Afghan refugees today. A number of Afghan prisoners held in Iran have been convicted of involvement in drug trafficking. With a 900-kilometer (560-mile) border with Afghanistan, Iran has been used as the main conduit for smuggling illicit drugs from its neighbor to drug kingpins in Europe. In response, the Iranian government has spent over $700 million to seal its borders and prevent the transit of illicit drugs destined for European, Middle Eastern, and Central Asian countries. Despite the presence of U.S. and British troops in Afghanistan and their extensive public relations campaign about their efforts to eliminate the production and smuggling of drugs, 3,600 tons of opium was produced in Afghanistan in 2010, based on UN statistics and estimates.