By Kyaw Ye Lynn

YANGON, Myanmar

Around $27 million worth of heroin and drug pills have been seized in Myanmar’s second largest city, a senior police officer said Sunday.

Myint Aung of the Anti-Narcotics Task Force for upper parts of Myanmar told Anadolu Agency that police had confiscated a 20-foot-long (6-meter) container full of heroin and methamphetamine Saturday in Pyigyitagun Township of central Mandalay.

“Roughly, the amount of the drug seizure would be 32.47 billion Kyats, and the largest seizure in 2016 and the record seizure in the Mandalay region,” he said.

Police found around 7 million stimulant tablets, 70 kilograms (154 pounds) of methamphetamine – also known as “ice” – 25 kilograms of heroin and 13 kilograms of opium in the container.

They also recovered around 1,000 kilograms of chemicals that authorities believe would have been used in making drug pills in four vehicles in the same area.

Police have detained three suspects in connection to the drug seizure, Myint Aung told Anadolu Agency by phone.

“All three suspects are Burmese [Myanmar] Chinese,” he said.

Myanmar is one of the countries making up the Golden Triangle, a 950,000 square-kilometer area also straddling the borders of Laos, Vietnam and Thailand that is among the major illegal opium-producing regions in Asia.

Myanmar, the world's second largest opium producer after Afghanistan, had extended in 2012 its 15-year drug eradication plan (1999-2014) by another five years amid failures in its war on drugs.

The largest-ever seizure of narcotics in the country took place in July last year, when authorities seized $106 million worth of drugs in an abandoned container on the outskirts of commercial capital Yangon.