KABUL, Afghanistan 

The Afghanistan government said on Thursday that it busted a ring of five top police officials involved in drug peddling across Kabul and bordering Central Asian states.

Nusrat Rahimi, an Interior Ministry spokesperson, said that Ahmad Ahmadi, who headed the counter-narcotics force in the capital city, had been arrested while trying to flee the country.

He told a presser that Ahmadi was one of the "leading drug peddlers and mafia kingpin" who also headed a suspicious "Afghan Swiss" business group besides protecting, promoting and taking bribes from drug pushers in the city of over six million people.

Four other senior officers of the force, who were collaborating with Ahmadi, had also been taken into custody, Rahimi added.

One of the leading poppy producers in the world, Afghanistan has a large population of drug addicts -- an estimated four million.

In its latest quarterly report, John F. Sopko, the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, reported that Washington allotted some $8.94 billion to fight drugs in Afghanistan since 2002.

According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the global value of poppy cultivated in Afghanistan is worth billions of dollars.