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BANGKOK (AP) — Thai police have seized what’s being known as a file haul of methamphetamine tablets within the western province of Kanchanaburi, near the Myanmar border.
Officers discovered an estimated 50 million tablets hidden in sacks in a six-wheeler truck they stopped at a joint police-military checkpoint on Tuesday, 12 December. The occupants of the truck—a person and a girl—have been arrested.
The amount of methamphetamine tablets seized is a file for Thailand, Jeremy Douglas, the Southeast Asia regional consultant for the United Nations Workplace on Medicine and Crime, stated Wednesday. The area’s largest identified seizure befell in neighboring Laos in October 2021, when a consignment of 55 million tablets was found.
“We’ve not seen main instances right here in Kanchanaburi for a few years, and by no means something like this,” Douglas stated. “However it’s additionally not a shock given the acute provide being produced by militias and traffickers in northern Myanmar.”
Myanmar has traditionally been the area’s important drug manufacturing space partially due to lax safety measures in border areas the place minority ethnic teams have lengthy been preventing for better autonomy. A number of the highly effective ethnic armed teams there have been closely concerned in narcotics manufacturing for many years.
A 2021 army takeover in Myanmar that unseated the elected authorities of Aung San Suu Kyi triggered armed resistance nationwide, additional destabilizing the nation.
The U.N. drug company’s June 2023 report on artificial medicine in East and Southeast Asia warned that the large commerce in methamphetamine and different unlawful medicine reveals no indicators of slowing down.
Thailand’s Deputy Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, who can also be the inside minister, advised reporters that unlawful medicine was smuggled into Thailand’s northern and northeastern provinces however had moved to western provinces reminiscent of Kanchanaburi due to extra intense surveillance and safety alongside the previous routes, some extent the U.N. company had additionally made earlier this yr.
Anutin stated elevated fight between Myanmar’s army and its foes among the many nation’s pro-democracy motion and ethnic minority armed teams additionally elevated the smugglers’ dangers alongside their previous routes.
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By Related Press
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