(Corrects paragraph 5 word to ‘reponsibility’)
TRIPOLI, Oct 10 (Reuters) – Libya’s military brigade seized more than 1.3 million narcotic pills after a firefight with smugglers in a southeastern town that injured three soldiers, the military said on Friday.
The north African nation has become a major regional transit hub for synthetic drugs and other narcotics en route to domestic users and elsewhere in the continent, the UN said in January.
In a statement, a military media unit said the Subul al-Salam infantry brigade in Kufra, about 1,700 km (1,000 miles) from the capital, Tripoli, targeted hideouts used by traffickers of narcotics and illicit goods.
Pictures it posted showed soldiers standing around tens of transparent plastic small bags filled with round white pills bearing the number one and a sentence in black that read “made in Germany”.
The brigade operates under the Land Forces General Staff and owes responsibility to the military commander Khalifa Haftar of the eastern-based Libyan National Army.
The statement gave no value for the drugs seized.
Drug gangs have exploited the tumultuous situation in the country since 2011, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said in a January report.
Libya plunged into a prolonged period of internal conflict and division after former ruler Muammar Gaddafi was toppled in a NATO-backed uprising that year.
Five people were handed death sentences by a court in the Western Mountains region, about 160 km (100 miles) southwest of Tripoli, for importing more than 2 million pills of psychotropic substances, the attorney general said in October.
(Reporting by Hani Amara in Cairo and Ahmed Elumami in Tripoli; Writing by Ahmed Elumami; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
