DAKAR - West Africa is drawing up a plan to fight drug trafficking, in particular of Latin American cocaine and Asian heroin being smuggled to lucrative markets in Europe, a regional crime fighter said on Tuesday.

Abdullahi Shehu, who heads West Africa's programme against money laundering, received an additional mandate last month from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to fight drugs cartels, whose grip on the region appears to be growing.

"We don't want to reinvent the wheel, but we want to make a practical difference within the shortest time," Shehu said during a meeting in Senegal where experts were drawing up the plan to submit to leaders of the 15 ECOWAS members in December.

"They want something long-term, but they are also concerned about the short term," Shehu told reporters. "This will consist of a plan for one year ... reducing the traffic of cocaine in particular into the region, while other goals are ongoing."

Record drug seizures in recent months have exposed networks using West Africa's poorly policed shorelines and vast empty deserts to smuggle hard drugs into Europe.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reports say cocaine seizures in West Africa shot up by a factor of seven to 14 tonnes in 2006 from just two the previous year, Shehu said in a speech to the Senegal meeting on Monday.

He said lax border controls, civil conflicts, poverty, corruption, a huge pool of poor people ready to be turned into drugs couriers or "mules", and tighter law enforcement elsewhere in the world all made West Africa attractive to drug smugglers.

Another factor was geography, said Shehu, director-general of the Inter-Governmental Action Group Against Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing in West Africa, known by its briefer French acronym GIABA. "Guinea-Bissau is a fairly straight 4,000 miles across the Atlantic from the coca fields of South America," he said.


REGIONAL APPROACH

Guinea-Bissau, a small, desperately-poor former Portuguese colony south of Senegal, has been identified by drugs trade experts as a hub for Latin American gangs shipping or flying in Colombian cocaine to be smuggled on to Europe.

"Guinea-Bissau is at the threshold of gaining (a) reputation as Africa's first narco-state," Shehu said in the speech.

"Any leader that allows drug traffickers to take over his country is digging his own grave," he added on Tuesday.

Yet the country's police chief told Reuters last week her force, pitted against well-equipped cartels spanning three continents, has no vehicles, computers, radios or handcuffs.

"Drug traffickers fly the coastal waters in this region and the drug officers don't even have flying boats," Shehu said.

"We need to approach this matter as a region. Allowing drug traffickers to come from Latin America to Guinea-Bissau is not the problem of Guinea-Bissau alone," he said.