Police destroyed six tons of drugs worth 300 million yuan (44 million U.S. dollars) Wednesday in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

This was the largest drug-destruction action in the city's history, said Zhang Jun, deputy head of the Urumqi Public Security Bureau.

A special police force escorted four trucks carrying heroin, hemp and opium to a cement company in Urumqi, the regional capital, and spent four hours incinerating the drugs.

The city faced increasing drug trafficking from the "Golden Crescent", a mountainous region spanning Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan and one of the world's top sources of opium that is processed into heroin, Zhang said.

Since January 2008, local police have cracked more than 1,100 drug cases and arrested 1,289 suspects.

(Xinhua News Agency June 25, 2009)