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Drug traffickers killed two policemen in a clash near the Pakistani border in southeastern Iran, the state news agency IRNA reported on Friday.
The incident took place on Wednesday near the city of Saravan in Sistan-Baluchestan province, it said. Local police named the border policemen killed as Ali Qorban Ebrahimi and Nasser Sheibani.
Security forces seized 677 kilos (1,492 pounds) of narcotics after the clash, IRNA said, without reporting arrests or casualties among the smugglers.
Southeast Iran lies on a major narcotics route from neighbouring Afghanistan and Pakistan.
According to UN estimates, about 40 percent of the 7,700 tonnes of narcotics produced in Afghanistan in 2008 entered Iran, which itself faces serious drug abuse among its mostly young population of 70 million.
Iran has been battling drug traffickers for decades and it has lost more than 3,700 men in a war on its porous eastern border.
