Mounties in British Columbia said they arrested three men in Surrey believed to be linked to a transnational organized crime group linked to Mexican drug cartels, while four other men were suspected of trafficking large quantities of drugs, including diverted prescription pills, were arrested in Burnaby.

Federal RCMP investigators say that on September 23, police searched a Surrey home surrounded by fences, steel gates and barbed wire, and arrested men allegedly involved in importing cocaine into Canada .

They said officers also seized 23 firearms, several thousand rounds of ammunition and “several kilos of illegal drugs” from the house.

The arrests in Burnaby, British Columbia, stem from a four-month investigation into interprovincial drug trafficking that included the execution of search warrants in the neighboring cities of Coquitlam and Surrey, police said.

They said officers seized more than 9,500 hydromorphone pills believed to be diverted prescription pills, as well as other substances, including more than a kilogram of suspected cocaine.

The group is believed to have shipped the drugs as far as Manitoba and the Yukon, as well as locally, police said.

The announcement of the seizures follows the RCMP’s claim that it had dismantled “the largest and most sophisticated drug superlaboratory” ever seen in Canada in British Columbia’s interior.

At that time, the RCMP said they had evidence the site was being used to make methamphetamine from P2P (phenyl-2-propanone), an activity never before seen in Western Canada but common among Mexican cartels.

WATCH | Inside Canada’s most sophisticated illicit drug lab:

Inside the ‘most sophisticated’ pharmaceutical lab in Canadian history | About that

Police in British Columbia say they have dismantled the “largest and most sophisticated drug superlab” in Canadian history, confiscating 89 firearms and hundreds of kilograms of drugs. Andrew Chang analyzes information provided by the RCMP and drug manufacturing experts on what makes this laboratory so sophisticated and the potential scope of this criminal network.