PITTSBURGH — The city’s top federal prosecutor is teaming up with district attorneys in four outlying counties in hopes of “choking” the flow of guns and drugs into and through the 25-county Western Pennsylvania federal court district.

U.S. Attorney David Hickton told The Associated Press he will be holding news conferences today, Wednesday and Thursday with prosecutors in Cambria, Erie, Lawrence and Washington counties to announce the new program.

Hickton is using $44,000 in leftover Project Safe Neighborhoods grant money so the district attorneys can each pay an assistant prosecutor to work part-time as a special federal prosecutor on major gun and drug cases.

Hickton picked those counties because each has a major interstate or U.S. highway running through it or nearby.

“I’m hoping it will be a choke point for the flow of the guns and the drugs,” Hickton said. “It’s designed to give us a presence where the highways are, because they’re the arteries for the guns and the drugs.”

Washington County District Attorney Eugene Vittone, who will be at the first news conference with Hickton today in Washington, Pa., said the program will put valuable law enforcement resources — including the FBI and federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — more directly in touch with his office whenever a major weapons or drug seizure happens.

“We’re going after the most serious offenders and having access to that federal grand jury system and working with the U.S. Attorney’s Office really makes it easier on us,” Vittone said.

Vittone’s county contains the junction of Interstates 70 and 79, the major east-west and north-south arteries in the western part of the state. Erie sits at the junction of I-79 and I-90 — a major road connecting the region to Cleveland, Detroit and other areas known to supply drugs and weapons that runs into New York State.