RIYADH — Saudi officers thwarted an attempt to smuggle 47
million amphetamine pills into the country, state media reported Wednesday,
describing it as the largest ever drug trafficking operation in the kingdom.
اضافة اعلان
Six Syrians and
two Pakistanis were arrested in a raid after the pills, concealed in a flour
shipment, arrived at a dry port in the capital Riyadh and were taken to a
warehouse, the Saudi Press Agency said.
A spokesman for
the Saudi General Directorate of Narcotics Control said it was the “biggest
operation of its kind to smuggle this amount of narcotics into the Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia in one operation”, the agency said.
The report did
not specify whether the pills were captagon — the amphetamine wreaking havoc
across the Middle East — nor did it say where the pills came from.
Captagon pills
are produced mainly in Syria and smuggled to large consumer markets in the
Gulf.
Trade in captagon
in the
Middle East grew exponentially in 2021 to top $5 billion, posing an
increasing health and security risk to the region, a report by the New Lines
Institute said in April.
Saudi Arabia is
the biggest captagon market, and the kingdom’s customs body seized 119 million
of the pills last year.
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