Haiti to hit secret airstrips used for smuggling

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Haitian authorities are trying to root out a network of secret airstrips used to smuggle in South American cocaine bound for the United States, a top security official said Monday. The effort comes days after Haitian police and UN peacekeepers intercepted 420 kilograms (925 pounds) of cocaine in a coastal town in the Caribbean country's biggest drug seizure in more than a decade. Much of the cocaine entering Haiti arrives by plane, usually small, single-engine aircraft that land on remote airstrips hidden throughout Haiti's poorly guarded countryside. "We want to identify these airstrips, find out who owns them and who they're associated with," Luc Eucher Joseph, Haiti's secretary of state for public safety, told broadcaster Radio Metropole.